Bug of the moment 2011-03-13

Flash Player is feeling blittery lately

I took the following screenshots yesterday with the intention of posting them eventually. I thought at first that this was a return to the old GTK+ GDI handle leak bug as opening Pidgin’s buddy list appeared to trigger it.

After closing Pidgin and finding that the top-left of my screen was still being constantly overwritten with a black rectangle, I then suspected that Flash Player was to blame, having just updated it the other day:

As fast as I moved the cursor over this area of the screen to trigger a redraw, the black rectangle was being drawn back. It’s some sort of nasty blitter bug, because Process Explorer confirmed that there was no window enclosing the black box. I would like to believe that, as of Vista, Microsoft has finally banned software from writing directly to the framebuffer.

Here, a frame of video from YouTube has ended up in the black box:

Only after I killed Firefox’s plugin-container.exe did this problem go away. (The video is the full version of Anna – Pantograph Bouncing without the bizarre music video.)

I decided I had to post the screenshots after the problem recurred:

Fortunately it was only very temporary this time.

Thanks Adobe!

Posted 13th March 2011 – Comments and questions?