Why does Visual Studio 2015 blur all the lines in the text-editor together?

Question

For the past two weeks, I have been experiencing some very strange behavior with Visual Studio 2015 Professional. I will be writing code when all of a sudden multiple different lines will become blurred together. I have a photograph of what it looks like when this happens shown below:

Once this happens it does not stop. I have tried the following to fix the problem:

• Closing/re-opening Visual Studio 2015 but that does not fix the problem.
• Rebooting my PC, but again that does not fix the problem.
• I have tried the "repair" option from the Visual Studio installer, and that did not make any difference whatsoever.

I have notice that doing some of the following occasionally makes the problem go away temporarily.

• Deleting the .vs folder from the project directory. However even after deleting the .vs folder, the problem resurfaces within a day.
• Occasionally just doing a clean solution will do the trick and make the problem go away for a while...

As one of the comments suggested, I thought about what I had added on to Visual Studio since the problem started occuring. I've realized that one of those things is Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Installer Projects. After removing/re-adding the .vdproj installer project from my solution, the problem went away. At this point I am not sure whether or not it will come back. I will wait a while and then provide an update.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on here? This is seriously interrupting my work.

Updates

The installer project had nothing to do with this problem, and just doing a clean seems to be the most effective at making the problem go away.

I looked into disabling the hardware acceleration, but do not have sufficient rights here on this computer. So this will not be an option for me.

Ok, so after disabling the hardware acceleration feature within Visual Studio, the problem immediately showed up after closing/re-opening the solution.

Although I do not know how to fix this problem, I think that I see what is causing it. Inside of my WPF project solution, I have my MainWindow.xaml file open in one window and my MainWindow.xaml.cs file open in another. When I click on one of the elements inside of the MainWindow.xaml file and then use my mouse to scroll on MainWindow.xaml.cs (without first giving focus/clicking) then problem occurs. Once I click on the MainWindow.xaml.cs text-editor window, the problem seems to go away. This is how I've been able to recreate the problem, hopes this helps figure out what is going on here. Let me know if this doesn't make sense.

This doesn't just happen in WPF anymore, but in any project.

Answer 1

Following the comment above - the issue seems to be with the text graphics not refreshing correctly and leaving ghosts/artifacts that are scrollable and everything (typically, I have this problem most frequently in Word but sometimes also even in web browsers - basically anything working with large amounts of text lines).

I don't know the permanent solution but a momentary work-around for that is to force it to refresh, which can be done e.g. by highlighting it (best way is CTRL+A). The lines will then unmerge and appear in their correct positions.

Answer 2

I had this same problem, and it was driving me crazy...

I'm happy to report that I have just found an effective means to solve this issue!

Problem: I had some tools/widgets docked to the sides of the code editor. Something must have gotten corrupted, or set wrong, in my configuration files.

Fix: I docked all tools/widgets to the bottom of the screen. After doing that, the code editor now scrolls properly.

Thankfully, I was able to re-dock my tools/widgets to my preferred locations and the scrolling issue did NOT come back.