#11913 (Bug) Profile loader reloads profiles every few seconds under Windows 10 April update

+1 1

Closed as Not A Bug
Component: DisplayCAL 3.5.3
Created by Sarah Gerweck

Last modified

I just updated to the Windows 10 April update (Windows 10 Pro 10.0.17134). Since updating, I am seeing DisplayCAL’s profile loader update my monitor calibration roughly every fifteen seconds. (I just let it run for four minutes and it told me “calibration state was (re)applied 17 times today” when I clicked it.) I have been getting similar reapplication rates since I updated, and I see the little icon spin.

These appear to be reloads due to false positives in the change detection, as when I disable “preserve calibration state” or quit the profile loader, the monitor’s calibration stays perfectly fine—unless I run an application that resets the profile. I don’t believe I have any other applications that would be modifying the profile (unless Microsoft is doing something silly in the new version of Windows). The fact that my calibration persists when the profile loader is disabled seems to suggest that these are some form of false positives.

Unfortunately, this seems to be causing a significant issue and not just wasting a few CPU cycles: when the profile loader is active, my displayed image has been occasionally flashing to the identity ramp for a short time (a single display refresh, I suspect). This has happened at the same time I’ve seen the profile-reload animation. Disabling the profile loader seems to have stopped this behavior as well. I’m not intimately familiar with Windows display drivers, but my suspicion is that when the profile loader tells Windows to install the display profile, the ramps get momentarily reset to the default color ramp by either Windows or the Nvidia driver, and that this intermediate state is only ever drawn to screen if it happens to overlap the moment when a display refresh begins. This hypothesis fits the observation that the profile is gets updated several times per minute but I’ve only seen the identity-ramp refreshes a few times per hour. (This has been intermittent so I will update the ticket if I see anything that conflicts with this hypothesis.)

I was running DisplayCAL 3.5.2 initially, but I upgraded to 3.5.3 and am seeing this behavior. (I didn’t check the reset rate on 3.5.2, so I’m not positive as to whether the behavior was identical before the update to 3.5.3.) I’ve attached my logs directory, though the logs don’t seem to include the timing and reasons for profile installation. I’d be happy to collect more information if it would be helpful. I have tried rebooting, restarting Profile Loader, and reinstalling the profile.

I’ll rig something up with AutoHotKey so I can manage without the profile loader for a few days, but I’d love to see this fixed. Thanks in advance!

dispcalGUI (application/zip | 2018-05-09 08:44:35)

11 comments on “Profile loader reloads profiles every few seconds under Windows 10 April update”

  2. Thanks @Florian: I did see the option to turn off the animation, so that isn’t a problem for me. The real issue that’s led me to turn off the profile loader for now is the transient flipping to an uncalibrated state I mentioned; otherwise I’d just leave it running and hide the animation.

    As I said, let me know if there’s any other information I can provide that would help. If you want something like a dxdiag dump, I’d rather send that by email since it has more detailed information about my computer.

    1. If there’s something like flashing or similar visual glitches going on, then that has to be caused by some other circumstances because the profile loader just straight sets the videoLUT to the calibrated values without first clearing the latter. Graphics driver bug maybe? I have an nVidia 1070 with the 391.35 driver, which shows no such issues under my (up-to-date) Win10. I haven’t yet installed the latest nVidia driver.

  3. Yes, as I said, there’s flashing to the uncalibrated state and back something like 1% of the time when it resets the profile. This wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t resetting the profile every fifteen seconds.

    1. There’s nothing I can do about that though. You’ll have to figure out what is going on on your system. The Windows event log may be a place to start, look for graphics driver related entries.

  4. Is the expected behavior of the profile loader is it should set the profile every fifteen seconds even if it’s already set to the correct profile? I don’t remember it doing that in the past.

    1. From the very first version, it re-applied the calibration every three seconds. I later changed that to re-apply calibration when a change in running processes is detected (and since then, it also counted these implicit re-applications of calibration states in addition to manual, explicit reloads), so the frequency is now lower than it was initially (depending on how rapidly you open/close applications or system services are started/stopped), but it can’t go faster than every three seconds. It doesn’t do anything to the profile associations (other than making sure the correct profile gets set when disabling a display in a multi-display configuration when “Automatically fix profile associations” is enabled).

  5. Thanks for the clarification: I agree that, in that case, this is working as intended and not your bug. Thanks for the assistance.

  6. Hi everbody, I was looking on the web about this “issue”.
    I have the same behaviour on my laptop, MS Surface Book.
    Before April Update the laptop screen was keeping the calibration profile loaded.

    Now during normal usage I can notice the profile gets unloaded and then reloaded after some seconds.
    This happens randomly.

    Now I’m on 391.95 Nvidia driver, I’ll try to update the GPU driver with the latest.

    1. @Andre84RG my solution was to disable DisplayCAL’s profile loader and build a profile loader of my own using AutoHotKey.

      1. Hi, good to know you’ve found a workaround.
        Actually I prefer DisplayCal profiler loader working as before.
        I dont know what’s causing this, but we both had the same issue so it isn’t a single case.

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