Envy 17 problem with IE9

I've installed IE9 and experienced problems with (1) the min, max and close icons (upper right corner) in that they are shadowed, ghosted, etc. and (2) forms don't display properly - there may be a box where you're supposed to fill in info but you can't see the outline of the box. I'm running at max resolution. By turning off aero and changing the "theme" I've had some improvement in the min/max thing but it's still not quite right and the forms still don't work right. I've made sure I had the latest video driver (tried both HP's and ATI's). When I sys restore back to IE8 all is fine again. I've tried this a few times with the same bad results. I have IE9 on four other PC's with no issues and would like get it working on the Envy.

 

I know you have tried changing the theme; but did you activate the Envy theme on setup when you powered on your notebook for the first time?

 

Well, I've had the Envy for quite awhile but as far as I can remember, I accepted whatever defaults it came with. I don't remember an option given at the time.

 

Well, if you have a theme available that is not the standard Windows 7 Aero theme (I think HP did a pewter colored theme with custom taskbar), then you did. I am wondering if the custom HP Envy theme screwed up some libraries....
Need someone else with Envy 17 (or even 14 for the matter) that has the custom theme installed to verify.

 

The solution is quite simply to use Chrome/Firefox/Opera .

/unhelpful

I'm really not sure what would cause the UI elements of IE9 to be borked like that on your envy - do you perhaps have some Ease of Use option on, or maybe you've played around with DPI settings?

Theme-wise, I doubt that's what's causing your issue, but if it is, the only way that would cause IE-specific issues would be if HP slipped in a custom version of, say, uxtheme.dll that isn't playing nicely with the way IE9 was written to be rendered.

 

I may have finally found the solution. This PC had several Stardock products as part of its preloaded "stuff". Although I do like their Fences program and use it on several PC's, I was unaware that there was also a couple other programs from Stardock on there. One of them was "window blinds" which has something to do with theme manipulation. When I discovered this and uninstalled it, I reinstalled ie9 and so far it appears to be working. The min/max/close buttons for example look and act normal now.