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This is the setting. This screen is accessed by systempropertiesperformance.exe. This setting needs to be unset for accessability reasons. Every half hour or so, something sets it again. It's not really time based. Leaving the computer idle doesn't do it; but normal usage does.

The problematic behavior of something turning it on started a week ago. Previously, once set off, smooth edges of screen fonts would stay off.

How do I track down what sets it so I can put a stop to it? Normal registry audit audits users not processes.

Please don't come by and say this question is missing the thing that's setting it. The point of the question is I need to know how to find the thing that's setting it.

A comment has been posted suggesting use of ProcMon. This is what the ProcMon filter screen currently looks like:

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It should be obvious that's unusable.

Joshua
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2 Answers2

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Partial answer. This gets it to stick for awhile but the problem comes back again.

There's some bleed back and forth between the old system settings and the new system settings; it appears the new system settings has a different idea of where this setting is stored. By opening both new system settings (from settings in start) and old system settings (by running systemsettingsperformance.exe) at the same time and turning it off in both places one right after the other (so that both of them loaded their screens before either one of them saved); it finally stopped getting turned on again. I still can't explain the oddball delay but who knows what wild code is in these modern UI windows apps these days [it's most likely the old one didn't change].

Joshua
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According to 11 Forums, there is a Registry key holds the value for Smooth edges of screen fonts, [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\FontSmoothing. Setting the value to zero should turn off smoothing. Here are a few things to try:

  1. Set smoothing off, and export HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\ to a .reg file. This would simplify changing back after Windows 11 messes up that setting. For this change to take effect, Explorer must be stopped and restarted.

  2. The same thing can be accomplished with a PoweerShell script. Save the following as a .ps1 file, make a desktop and/or keyboard shortcut to it, and execute it when the display goes awry.

    Set-ItemProperty 'HKCU:\Control Panel\Desktop\' -Name FontSmoothing -Value 0
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
start explorer.exe

  3. You can effectively lock Desktop settings by taking ownership and excluding System changes. However, This is untested, and might make it difficult to change settings in the key, or cause issues with Windows! Before trying this, make a full drive image, as backing out Registry changes may be difficult.

    • Right-click on HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\.
    • Select Permissions.
    • Click Advanced.
    • Check Replace all child... and then change Owner from System to yourself.
    • You then should be able to remove Full control from System.

Please let me know if this helped, and what, if anything, worked best.

DrMoishe Pippik
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