Menu+Titlebars Broken in Win 7 + Windowblinds

I just installed the Cubase 8 Artist upgrade, but it is rather unusable right now. The worst problems are connected to that new “main menu” or whatever it is called. I am using dual screen and although I guess its a nice idea to have a gray background to turn off distractions from other programs there is no clear connection from the main menu (right hand screen) to my arranger window (left hand screen). So that adds unnecessary mileage. On top they broke the windows-specific shortcuts ALT+F for file menu etc. so we are forced to use the mouse and go to the other screen.

Now there are soime serious additional problems that might be caused by having Windowblinds on my system; the problem is that I am not allowed to disable windowblinds for Cubase because it needs the “Aero” support, so I am stuck with it

  1. the titlebars of all Cubase windows are not drawn - no minimize maximize, restore buttons. I can sort of guess where they are but it is a distraction:

I might yet find some settings in WB to remedy this

  1. a much bigger problem is that if I maximize the arranger it is painted over the main menu, making all my menu items inaccessible - so effectively I will have to restore the arranger window any time I need to access a menu item:

Does anybody else think that this is a serious usability issue? Shouldn’t a top menu at least always be on top of all other windows?

  1. On top of this (again, this one might be caused by WB) the active menu items do not align with the menu; they seem to be narrower so you have to guess where you are clicking - it kind of works on File and Edit but gets worse the further to the right you get

  1. As mentioned above, the Windows standard has ALT+Shortcuts for all main menus, which are usually highlighted when we hit the ALT key, e.g. windows explorer:

this is “expected behavior”, but with Cubase 8 I am now forced to use the mouse and travel across screens: not a great experience.

I guess I could work with Cubase 8 if I could turn off that broken menu, otherwise, Steinberg please fix these annoying bugs. It just adds too much pain if we constantly have to do extra work to get at the main menu commands. Also we should not be forced to uninstall Windowblinds, can you find some settings or an Application-specific Theme that works for Cubase 8?

I’m in the same boat :frowning:. I don’t use windowsblinds but WindowsFX and the menu has same behaviour (can’t stay on top, goes blurred). The menu items not aligned is a bug with the size of the menu font. Try to change the menu font size to see if you can fix it.

Interesting, I use WindowsFX as well. But I decided to go back to Aero for a while after uninstalling WB which makes Cubase usable again. There are some “application specific” settings in WB with which I had some partial success when I had similar issues with Mozilla apps (mainly Firefox and Thunderbird) who also love to paint their own stuff into the “glassed” titlebar. They have some specific options (which I cannot screenshot at the moment, because it isn’t installed) which deal with glassed areas, so you might still have some luck if you installed WB and experimented with them. At the moment I am not too bothered in getting WB back because Cubase 8 is quite productive (compared to VST which I used for 12+ years now) - especially the “free warp” options are amazing.

I am still sitting on the fence about the topmost menu (why not paint the menus into the titlebar and leave the maximizing to the user, like we are used to in windows?) but at least I can use it now. Another thing that bothers me a little is that the arranger window (of course) has to have focus for the transport bar shortcuts to work, so we cannot use them while we are fiddling with the mixer, which is a pity.