[vtk-developers] window going blank...

[Lisa Avila]

I have a nice brand new desktop with 64 bit Vista. An issue that has 
been a minor problem for years is now more of a major problem. Here is 
the basic concept:

set up a pipeline to view the first image in an animation series

while ( !done )
  {
  change the reader input to the next image
  renWin->Render();
  }

Previously on my 32bit XP system this worked for a while (where "a 
while" was something on the order of a minute). After that the window 
would just go to white or black, and would return only after the 
animation was done. Now on my 64 bit Vista machine, "a while" has become 
much shorter (sometimes just a second or two). In either case, if you 
cause another window to be active, or anything else pops up on the 
screen (like those little alert bubbles that pop up from the bottom bar) 
then you immediately lose the image. Perhaps the difference is that more 
of that is now happening in Vista and that is why I often only get a 
second or two of rendering before losing the image (although 
occasionally I will get 10 seconds or more...)

Is there a way to fix this? It should be valid to render in a loop and 
expect to see the results indefinitely, right? Or is that just not 
possible any more from raw C++ on Windows?

Sebastien sent me a link to 
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_7/ which has some of the 
pitfalls that might cause this - but I can't see anything we are doing 
in my simple example that would case this (there is no intermixed GDI 
which I think we only use for some instances of off screen rendering, we 
do return TRUE for WM_ERASEBKGRND, etc.)

Any ideas?

Lisa