Grey overlay placeholder box remains stuck on desktop after minimize or close (DWM race condition)

TeamSpeak 6 Client
,
1

I’ve been experiencing a very specific (and extremely annoying) bug with the TS6 beta overlay for nearly a year now.

What happens:

  • When launching/restoring TS6 from minimized, a solid grey rectangle appears first (the placeholder/animation canvas).
  • The actual UI then slides in from the taskbar area on top of it.
  • On minimize or close, the UI disappears correctly, but the grey placeholder box is not removed from the DWM compositor. It stays permanently visible on the desktop as a ghost rectangle.

Findings:

  • This only occurs when actually minimizing or fully closing TeamSpeak.
  • If I do not close, but only minimize TS6, simply unminimizing again makes the grey box disappear normally.
  • It is very sporadic (happens maybe once every few days/weeks), but has been reproducible on my system for almost a year across multiple beta versions.
  • Normal fixes do not work:
    • Restarting TS6 processes
    • Restarting explorer.exe
    • Win+Ctrl+Shift+B (full graphics driver reset)
    • Toggling overlay settings, hardware acceleration, etc.

Workaround:
Killing the Desktop Window Manager with taskkill /f /im dwm.exe (or signing out and back in of Windows) instantly clears it. This proves it’s a DWM surface that was never properly destroyed.

This feels like the same “grey placeholder hack” you’re using to prevent transparency/flicker during the slide-in animation. The destruction path on close/minimize isn’t 100% reliable.

Thanks!

2

Thanks for the detailed report, I’ll forward it to QA to further investigate.

Can you let me know what specs you are using on your computr?

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4

Hi Leon,

Thanks for the follow-up. Here are the details I think are most relevant:

OS: Windows 11 Pro 25H2 (Build 26200.8246)

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
RAM: 64 GB DDR4 @ 3600 MHz (4x 16 GB G.Skill Trident Z Neo, F4-3600C16)

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER
Driver: 596.36

Displays (dual-monitor setup), but I recall reproducing the issue when using just one monitor:

  • Monitor 1 (non-primary): LG 27GR95QE — 2560×1440 @ 240 Hz, VRR enabled
  • Monitor 2 (primary): LG 27GL850-B — 2560×1440 @ 144 Hz, VRR enabled

Color calibration: Calman Client3 (active ICC profile applied via Windows Color Management).

DWM: Composition enabled, AeroPeek enabled — default Windows 11 compositing stack, nothing unusual.

TS6 beta 4 theme: Built-in dark theme (no custom/user theme).

Let me know if you need anything else.

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