*SOLVED* Windows Media Center Resizing on HTPC/Receiver resume

So I've been searching the internet for a couple days about this issue. I have found similar threads to my issue (like this one or this one where people complain of WMC resizing to 1024 resolution) - but nothing that matches exactly what I am seeing.

I have a Vizio TV with an Onkyo TX-NR809 receiver and an AMD Llano A8 based HTPC. I keep WMC up all the time in Full Screen mode.

My HTPC goes into sleep mode when not in use which in turn will put the Onkyo in Standby mode after about 30 minutes. Following no signal from the receiver the TV will auto-off after another 10 minutes.

Generally, I shut the TV off manually, which uses CEC to auto shut off the receiver as well. I then just let the HTPC fall into sleep mode.

The problem is that a good portion of the time when I turn everything back on (use a remote keyboard to bring HTPC out of sleep and then TV power on also sends CEC to turn on Onkyo) my Windows Media Center has been minimized away from full screen.

Here is an example pic of what it looks like:



The box in the front is Realtek HD Audio Manager which is also auto-popping up on ocassion - another issue I am trying to deal with. But what I am trying to show is WMC up in the top left of the screen.

As you can see, it isn't technically "minimized" because it doesn't have a border around it. It is as if it was full screen on a smaller res display that then got resized - but it stuck.

The current fix is usually to minimize and maximize (sometimes twice) to get it to go back normal, but even then I sometimes have some strange drawing issues within the program. So, I really need to shut it down and reopen it.

I've tried several different configs within my receiver settings, but the issue is so random it is hard to test when it is happening and when it isn't. It seems to happen at least half the time I bring the devices out of sleep/off/standby in the morning, but I can't seem to reproduce it by manually cycling them all.

Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this?

thanks.

@ StarDog - I was afraid that it might be CC issues...hoping maybe there was some menu option that might help. What is the "right-order" for you?

@ Sammy - Could you point me to that thread if you still have it handy? Searching on these generic terms tends to bring up too much noise. I did however do an EDID override to that of my Vizio TV, however it doesn't seem to have helped at all. Of course, I'm a little new to the EDID stuff, and maybe I didn't do everything I could have.

Solved!

After messing around with all sorts of things from EDID overrides, to settings on the Onkyo and Vizio, I finally found the resolution.

I tended to agree that this was a Catalyst issue - as most people who have chimed in to me on various forums had listed this problem happening with their ATI cards as well.

First, I was able to reliably recreate the issue like this:
First, I have my receiver's HDMI set to "through" for my HTPC. This way, when I switch the receiver off, the HTPC will still be shown on the TV. When this happens, there would be about a 5-8 second delay as the HDMI was re-established between the TV and HTPC directly.

Everytime I did this with video playing (in my case, I just had a Netflix episode showing) the WMC screen would "minimize" as shown in my pic above. Switching the receiver back on would initiate another short handshake, and WMC would remain minimized. The quickest way to restore the image was to simply press "stop" on the video to go back to the Netflix menu as this would reset the WMC screen to full size. I could then resume playing the video in full screen.

Since I was able to reliably recreate the issue as above, I figured it must be something with WMC or Windows 7 having to basically "switch" between two different displays (even though the TV was the same - one was via the powered AVR, and the other was via the pass-"through"). Going off this guess I researched and found these two posts:

http://superuser.com/questions/96683...n-on-windows-7

http://forums.amd.com/game/messagevi...ighlight_key=y

Basically, ATI tries to re-detect the monitor on each switch, and although the monitor re-initializes with all the proper settings, the process seems to upset WMC. There are recommendations to do one or both of the following:

1) Disable auto-detect of monitors in CCC. This however was an option I couldn't find anywhere in the latest (12.1) CCC.

2) Disable the "AMD External Events Utility" (EEU). This utility installed with CCC doesn't seem to have any good information available on it. Most people will say it is the replacement for the older "ATI Hotkey Poller" however people claim that Hotkeys (if you use them) continue to work when the EEU is disabled.

It seems that people report that disabling this utility fixes multiple issues dealing with monitor detection and even some quality issues. And, apart from the hotkey issue (which apparently isn't even the case) no one can provide any information on what this service actually does. For me, that was enough to switch it off.

Once I did that my problem went away, no reboot even needed! I have tested the above scenario three times in a row and my WMC screen remains full size.

If anyone has any more information about the EEU, and why you might not want to shut it off, please let me know - but for now it is staying disabled.

I hope other's experiencing this issue can find some resolution with this too!