Lost the Aero style and other things on my Windows 7 machine

I've had a problem with my HP printer.  I contacted their technical support and got help with it.  They connected to my machine (a Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit) remotely and did some work on it.  Naturally, as often happens in such situations, my desktop had a flat apparence.  I've seen this happen before in other situations, but normally once the technical support person is done, the machine returns to it's normal appearance.

But not this time.

This time it still looks flat.  The Aero style is totally gone.  And I've noticed that when I pass my mouse over the items in my task bar, instead of seeing small images of the application running, all I see is a list of the various instances of that application running.

I don't like this appearance at all.  I'd like to know why it didn't return to the Windows 7 theme and how to get the Windows 7 theme back the way it was.

They are just getting you ready for Windows 8.

All kidding aside you might try this: http://support.microsoft.com/mats/aero_effects_not_working/en-us

A lot of remote control software defaults to turning off desktop compositing and sometimes lowers the color depth to keep the remote control session responsive. Usually everything gets put back when they disconnect, but sometimes not. Usually a reboot fixes it.

You may not even need to reboot, often just restarting the Desktop Window Manager service is enough.

There's also a built-in troubleshooter that should fix things for you.

19 hours ago, Craig_Matthews wrote

A lot of remote control software defaults to turning off desktop compositing and sometimes lowers the color depth to keep the remote control session responsive. Usually everything gets put back when they disconnect, but sometimes not. Usually a reboot fixes it.

 

I had hoped that logging off and back on again would fix it, but it didn't.  A reboot is what it took to fix this.

16 hours ago, Sven Groot wrote

You may not even need to reboot, often just restarting the Desktop Window Manager service is enough.

How do you restart the Desktop Window Manager service?

OK, I think I've found it in the Services applet.  Restarting that won't cause any serious disruption in Windows?

@Doctor Who: You could end the dwm.exe process with task manager. It's not something that I would recommend doing with unsaved documents open.

-Josh