xtal256

There seems to be a taskbar button and/or Glass/Aero frame with stale background and that's it. Ah that might be it. When an app "hangs" in Windows, I often see it's window being replaced with a window owned by DWM. That's when the window goes translucent white. By the way, I apologise for any crashes in WD. I did work on improving it's stability while it was in active development, but I haven't touched it in over a decade. At this stage I'm just glad some people are still getting use out of it!

Have you tried refreshing the Window Detective tree (Green button in the toolbar, or menu View > Refresh)? Whilst Window Detective can track the creation and destruction of windows and automatically update the tree, it does not always see new windows. If you started up Window Detective after PMM and still can't see it's window, then I'm afraid I cannot offer any help. WD just uses the EnumChildWindows function to get all child windows of the desktop. I don't know if it's possible for PMM to show...

The last time I build it would have been with VS 2010, so there's probably a lot that has changed. But from the look of that screenshot, "CL.exe" (the compiler/linker) cannot be found. So perhaps something is wrong with the installation or paths. Try googling the error.

Thanks for using Window Detective. I have not worked on it in a long time, but I will consider your request if I ever pick it back up again. For the moment, you can see the number of immediate children (i.e. not including children of children) if you hover your mouse over a window in the list. Not sure how helpful that would be to you.

I've planned to do it for a while now, but I never got around to it. Been too busy with other stuff.

I suspect you are trying to monitor messages of a 64-bit application. Due to Window Detective being 32-bit, it can only monitor 32-bit applications. When viewing properties of a window in a 64-bit application, you might see an "access denied" warning message. However, nothing is logged if you attempt to monitor messages of those windows. In hindsight, I can see this would cause some confusion. If you are unsure, you can check if an application is 32 or 64 bit by using something like Process Hacker....

Ah, I have been able to reproduce now. I was previously trying on Windows 7, but when I used Win 10 like you have, I was able to see it crash pretty quickly. I only have my development tools on a Win 7 machine, so it will make debugging difficult. But I'll try to investigate some time soon.

Yes, I suspected that might have been the case. I've definitely encountered bugs like this before, but they are difficult to debug because they are so rare/intermittent.