Hey, I noticed that when I use a classic theme in Vista, blender is slooowwww and it seems there’s no graphics acceleration at all! I cannot understand this behavior, has anyone else experienced this?
Hey, well i guess obviously Vista switches-off the 3D global-style when you disable user-interface facilities that use 3D ??
Well, this almost makes me wanna cry, really! lol
Blender works fine here (in fact much better) with AERO turned off. What video card do you have?
GreyBeard
XFX GeForce 8800GTS…
I suspect it might have to do with a service, but I have no idea which one, since I disabled a few services I thought I didn’t need but don’t recall which ones…
Well… Reinstalled Vista, installed latest nVidia drivers, still got the problem. I am forced to use Aero to get blender working normally. Really, no one has actually experienced serious degrade of perfomance when using a classic theme in Vista??
I use a custom visual style now (transblack v2 
) That hasn’t changed anything for me, nor has turning off Aero in the past. And classic=/=turning off aero.
I think transblack still uses Aero though for composition. I don’t know. Anyone cares to test this? At the beggining of switching to a classic theme, blender works ok for me, and usually only if I allready have it open, but if you open it let’s say 10-15 minutes later it is sloooowww, you can even see the gesture lines getting rendered on screen really slow.
How can I troubleshoot that? Could it be a blender bug or a Vista “feature”? 
It could be a bug with the “classic” theme. Try using the standard Vista theme, just with aero disabled.
allready done that, still the same.
Damn.
I’ve only ever used Vista wiith Aero turned off, on a 1.66 GHz Core2Duo laptop with no special graphics hardware. Blender zips along nicely - that is, it’s not noticeably any slower in operation (apart from rendering of course) than my 2.66GHz Core2Duo desktop running XP with a Radeon X1650XT.
Does your nVidia driver install one of those pesky ‘advanced’ panels/applications (like ATI Catalyst) that interferes with everything graphics related? If so, could there be some automatic linking between Vista’s current mode and the facilities toggled on/off on the graphics card?
I use Vista Business 32 bit SP1, and I have an EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS.
I was curious about improving Blender’s performance by turning off Aero, and was surprised to find that there seemed to be absolutely no difference running Blender (at least on my box) with or without Aero, in classic or custom themes. So now I always leave Aero turned on.
I did, however, have a lot of trouble with the way Blender was displaying. Specifically, Vista was trying to anti-alias the window, but apparently Blender doesn’t like that.
What I had to do: go to NVidia Control Panel > Manage 3D settings > Global Settings window, and basically set everything to “off” or “application controlled.”
Your problem sounds a little different from mine, but you mentioned slow drawing of gesture lines, and Reaction asked about a pesky control panel, so it may be worth a try. I hope this helps.
That happened to me too once. It was set to x4 AA so everything was slow (damn my lame geforce8300) I completely forgot about that though. That just might be the problem!
Exact same problem here. I have vista Business x64 with a 9800 GX2 and blender’s view port is VERRRRRRY SLOOOOOW with Aero off. Turn it on and everything is nice again…
but, I have a fix (sort of).
if you “restore” the blender window, and then re-size it to be smaller then your screen, it goes back to full speed again. I don’t know why it works, but it does.
Let me know if you find a better solution.
–
Kevin