An interesting problem...

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
I've spent the last couple of days chasing a really strange problem and for the life of me I've no idea why it's happening.

The problem is that Windows will turn off the display, the screen goes blank and the backlight turns off, but the monitor (Asus ProArt) doesn't go into standby (the light doesn't change from white to orange). Normally when Windows turns off the display, about 5 seconds later the monitor shows the No Input message and a few seconds after that it goes into standby.

I confirmed it wasn't a hardware problem by running a Ubuntu system directly off the USB stick, that behaved as expected. Eventually I resorted to a clean reinstall of Windows and in that state (with all drivers installed by Windows Update) it also behaved as expected. The problem then had to be an app, so I installed them one at a time testing after each one. As you might imagine it turned out to be one of the last apps I installed...

My wife has an account with an online greetings card company (Jackie Lawson) and each Christmas they do an online Advent Calendar which is actually quite impressive (you have to pay for it). Although it's online the front end (which I assume does all the authorisation stuff) is a small Adobe Air app that the Jackie Lawson company has written. This app loads with Windows and places a rather attractive animated snow globe in the bottom right corner of the screen - and it's that snow globe that's the problem. If it's on screen the monitor never goes into standby but if I close the Adobe Air app the monitor goes into standby every time.

It's been fairly straightforward to stop the Adobe Air app starting with Windows, it's taken a little longer to train my wife to close it manually when she's done, so I have a decent workaround.

What I don't understand is how a simple Adobe Air app is stopping the monitor going into standby. I don't understand how, once Windows had turned off the display enough of a signal is still being received by the monitor to stop it detecting No Input and dropping into standby? I'm not sure whether it's a badly coded Adobe Air app or whether there is a flaw in the graphic driver (I use the integrated Intel HD 530 GPU) that's still sending some sort of signal to the monitor even after Windows has turned off the display.

It's not important of course but does anyone have any ideas? My money is on the driver, regardless of how good or bad any app is coded the driver should stop all graphics output when Windows turns off the display - shouldn't it?
 
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