Dr W - Fences Support

Reply to Give up Fences subscription since auto-icon-spacing is still broken after 5 years in Fences Stardock Forums

We are not reproducing the issue. A few users are reporting this. There are >100,000 active licensed copies of Fences. If it happened to everyone there would be tens of thousands of posts lasting over the course of a decade. I should add that spacing, when you change between DPIs and monitors, is something that Windows itself handles in an inconsistent manner and considerable work has been done to de-“mess-up” the spacing readings it provides when

Reply to Desktop icon spacing all messed up in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi Crash28, you should be able to paste an image directly in. To that end, if you could upload a debug log that would be helpful. (1) Enable advanced debug logging (important) - this allows spacing info to be captured (2) Reboot (3) Reproduce the issue (4) Send us the log. You can access this "Enable advanced logging" and "Create error package" from the About -> Troubleshooting menu <img src="https://cdn.stardock.us/for

Reply to Feedback & Feature Requests for Stardock Fences in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi mirok, interesting concept. Text without a background i.e. the skinny bar is not terribly practical unfortunately from a hit-testing perspetive and breaks a number of UX norms, so I don't see that coming. The border, team had made note for future considerations to help with contrast. Likewise reducing font size at large, which it does today but mostly only for scaling up. Always On Top mode is something that's been discussed but likewise, the desktop is the desktop,

Reply to udated yesterday to new version - all fences are now much larger with HUGE text in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi, please select "Enable Advanced Logging" from the menu / reboot, reproduce the issue and the team can have a look. The log upload does not have this enabled. Hopefully this log can give some information

Reply to Bug in Fences with folder portal in Fences Stardock Forums

Wow – yes I'd like us to get to the bottom of this. Ironically – we weren't aware of this issue from specific reports, but had identified this weakness while working on other things, and recent v6.42+ builds were supposed to improve this situation proactively. We changed from a system of saving the title of the navigated-to directory to the registry (therefore changing the save data on each navigation), to only the root folder name being saved / only saved further if

Reply to Fences 6 in Fences Stardock Forums

Fences 5 works with Windows 11. What problem are you experiencing?

Reply to Bug in Fences with folder portal in Fences Stardock Forums

basj, thanks for bringing this to dev team's attention Hi JonnyRando, this shouldn't be happening. Would like to get more information about what's going on. We might send a test build to help us get more information. Getting to the root of the flow... seems like it breaks after? I'm wondering how you "reset the view" to make it go back to working. (1) Is it navigated at startup, when this happens? Or at the root at time of startup? (

Reply to Lost functionality in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi Steve, unfortunately this is gone — it wasn’t by design, and we added ability to ensure icons weren’t getting lost underneath, which was a problem for many. This is a good idea though for adding ability to remove these specific icons from the desktop. We’ve forwarded it to the dev team. In the mean time you can create a group, place those in it, and set that group’s resting opacity to 0% to have it be hidden, or put them on an alternate page, where lik

Reply to Restore Fences to another computer? in Fences Stardock Forums

Thank you! One final question. Do you have many/any icons in "%public%\Desktop" that vary between the computers? If we do this functionality, we're going to have to figure out how to handle the reality that different computers are going to have different icons, I think.

Reply to Restore Fences to another computer? in Fences Stardock Forums

Good to know. Yup, the functionality we’re considering would sync contents, as well as offering to “copy” the layout from another PC. Btw one major thing we wouldn’t be able to work around — OneDrive can be a bit noisy around file changes. Tbd, but initial indications are that when you do change the contents of a group, it’s possible that you end up with a OneDrive notification of file changes on other PC, and certainly the config files

Reply to Restore Fences to another computer? in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi dcomo1, currently, re sync, this is not possible, but it's something we're potentially investigating. As we've considered, it, one major question is whether the two(+) PCs have the exact same screen resolution and DPI. In theory, this is usually "no", in which case the layout itself would not be able to sync, but, the Fence group context would, and the existance of groups. They'd just need to be manually placed. So, it's unclear if this has any value. As is there's no expli

Reply to Fences Backup to another computer does not work in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi Richard160, I'm wondering if the two computers use different screen resolutions? Fences remembers them on a per-resolution basis, so it would make sense if it is restoring the layout and then switching the layout to the saved layout, which is what was stored when that resolution was last used. In theory, if this is the case, you can modify the relevant backup file to remove/nurf the relevant resolution on the target system. In this case, if this data doesn't exist, it'

Reply to fences 6.44 display problem in Fences Stardock Forums

Ah! So moving the group fixes it? Interesting. Might need to do more work here to detect changes in sizing that are late. does pressing f5 fix it as well? (I know, infrequent) v6.46 has virtually no changes from v6.44 so again yes this seems like a system timing specific issue. Will have to continue to noodle on how to best next diagnose. Let’s see if we can chip away as it occurs. Thanks for the info

Reply to fences 6.44 display problem in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi avwohl, looking to try to work this out. Having a bit of a hard time as the numbers we're reading from the desktop do not seem to indicate the change 2026-04-24 20:30:01,206 - ReadDesktopSpacing 250/200/250 iconSize(96) desktopSpacingRaw(166,252) desktopSpacingAdj(150,227) sysMetricsRaw(188,188) sysMetricsAdj(150,150) lvSpacingRaw(236,236) lvSpacingAdj(236,236) shim(0) 2026-04-25 07:30:02,027 - DetectResolutionChange attempt | Monitor State [1|0,0|3840x2160]<

Reply to fences 6.44 display problem in Fences Stardock Forums

If you do, please again make sure advanced logging is enabled and submit an error report if able to see it again. Thanks for the help

Reply to Fences Settings Appears Twice in Startup Apps in Fences Stardock Forums

They are both bootloaders to starting up. Correct.

Reply to Fences Settings Appears Twice in Startup Apps in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi gio/klibor, good question. This is an old compatibility holdover. We've considered getting rid of it, but, in older Windows versions (and debatably current) there were advantages to being in both the HKCU and HKLM Run keys, in terms of whether or not some random antivirus might mess with it to cause it to not startup. These days, that's a less of a concern, and we could probably just be in HKLM, as to have a single startup entry – but, nonetheless we've kept both as it's harm

Reply to Fences 6.20 Release Feedback in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi Royce, thanks for sharing this. That "Power Options" menu, is this a built-in Windows functionality or an add-on we might be able to use?

Reply to Lost Desktop Icons in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi, you can find the advanced logging and create error report package items in the Troubleshooting menu within About

Reply to Feedback & Feature Requests for Stardock Fences in Fences Stardock Forums

These are all very good suggestions! Added them to dev team notes. I’m sure they’ll get some of these in. Very much appreciate. Btw if any mockups of this compact titlebar style you’re looking for, please feel free to post.

Reply to Lost Desktop Icons in Fences Stardock Forums

Understood. With the program uninstalled, and rebooted, still no icons? Fences does not make any permanent changes to the system for while not running, so I'm wondering what else is installed, at this point. Re-installing and producing an error log might give some additional insight, including a report of other loaded modules and system settings. <img src="https://cdn.stardock.us/forums/6/50/650776/64f06291-5d0f-46ba-90f7-f2f9155f5fc7.png" width="858" he

Reply to Lost Desktop Icons in Fences Stardock Forums

Toggle show desktop off and then on, and also enable auto arrange. if Fences were still installed we would ask that you enable advanced logging and upload a report, which would give us information to see what is going on on your system

Reply to Fences 6.20 upgrade run issues in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi, yes please give this one a try, v6.46, and hopefully it will resolve the issue: https://stardock.cachefly.net/software/Fences/Fences6/Fences6_6.4.6.1-j125-Setup.exe

Reply to Fences 6.44 Release Feedback in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi all, we've got this fixed! Thanks for your help. New build coming soon.

Reply to Fences 6.44 Release Feedback in Fences Stardock Forums

Hi all, thanks for these reports. We're looking into a crash issue with 6.44. So far, the issue hasn't shown in the reports, but we've added some additional crash-dump catching. (Fences lives inside of Explorer, so it can be difficult to be able to log all crashed, but the new logic will help.) For those experiencing this issue, we're hoping you could do the following. (1) Enable advanced error logging. You can do this by going to "About" -> "Troubleshoo