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For some time now, probably since installing Windows 10 1709 (fresh install, no upgrade) or maybe KB4058258 (see here and here), some applications are affected by massive GUI drawing slowdowns over the Windows uptime. The longer Windows was running, the slower the drawing gets. This usually happens after a week or two but it's not consistent. What normally appears in an instant then takes a second or two to render completely. I can literally watch Windows draw every single frame and border and control the UI consists of. And that can be quite a few. Windows 3 on an old 486 was never as slow.

The machine is an Intel Core i7 3xxx with 4 cores and hyper-threading. It has 16 GB RAM, a 256 GB system SSD and two other drives for data. Memory usage is almost never over 50%. I'm not doing much GPU related work except what apps do on their own (Firefox, Chrome, MS Office hw acceleration etc.).

The affected applications include at least Paint.NET (WPF, not MFC) and Beyond Compare 4 (unknown GUI toolkit), I'm not currently aware of others.

Restarting Windows fixes the problem for sure, but it will come back.

All Windows updates are installed (except feature upgrades). I have no other issues with this computer so the drivers should be okay. The same hardware has been used for previous Windows installations and this had never happened.

Does anybody know this behaviour? Or its cause? Or a fix? Windows 10 1809 will appear soon and I'll have to install that because I can't delay upgrades for more than a year.

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  • What's your time-frame for this? Hours, days, weeks? What's your level of 'spare resources'? 128GB SSD with 2GB free & only 4GB RAM, or 4TB drive & 64GB RAM? As it stands, the question is just too broad.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 19:15
  • I've updated my question to include this information.
    – ygoe
    Commented Sep 5, 2018 at 8:15
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    Damn, I have this EXACT same issue. Did you ever figure it out? Thanks.
    – flatterino
    Commented Apr 1, 2020 at 14:52
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    @flatterino IIRC it was a background application that was leaking handles (GDI handles or some other type returned by the WinAPI). After fixing that app, the problem went away.
    – ygoe
    Commented Apr 1, 2020 at 21:02
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    I was observing the same issue on my old Windows 10 machine, and I'm observing it as well on my new machine (a very beefy Threadripper 3970X machine). After two to three weeks of uptime, I need to reboot it because UI drawing has become overly laggy. Handle leaks were the first thing I suspected but I was never able to confirm it or pinpoint a specific application. What tools if any did you use to find out?
    – François Beaune
    Commented Apr 30, 2020 at 16:28

2 Answers 2

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Could Control Flow Guard be related? See this answer to a question similar to yours.

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As this old question seems to be getting a bit more attention recently, I'll post my recent comment as an answer, too.

IIRC it was a background application that was leaking handles (GDI handles or some other type returned by the WinAPI). After fixing that app, the problem went away.

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