Windows 10: Spontaneous Theme Change

Over the last few months, Windows 10 has been creating a new unsaved theme and making it current, overriding my preferred theme. I can switch back to my preferred theme and delete the spontaneously-created one, but it's really annoying as it sometimes happens several times per day, sometimes even two or three times within an hour.



Any ideas on how I stop this?



I'm running the latest updated version of Windows 10 on a one-year-old MSI GT72 laptop with one external monitor... Nvidia GTX 970M... if any of that has any bearing on this problem.

:)

 

Spontaneous Theme Change

One more thing I'd forgotten...

Up until recently, I was using three displays (laptop and two external monitors) and the wallpaper I was using was wide enough to cover all three. Then one of my monitors died. Since 1920x1200 monitors are quite expensive now (they're meant for pro-level
design work after all) I decided not to replace it and just go to a two-monitor set-up for now. Even though this spontaneous theme reset was happening before the third monitor died, I'm beginning to suspect the wallpaper has something to do with it. And I
honestly don't remember if the theme reset happened as often before my third display died or not because I usually just deal with it and get back to work. It's not like I was taking notes or anything.

The problem may lie in the fact that my laptop (like all being manufactured these days) is 1920x1080 while the other two monitors were 1920x1200, in effect, making the wallpaper—which was 5760x1200—too tall for the laptop even though it fit the other two
properly.

Yesterday after reading through the responses on this thread, it dawned on me that my wallpaper was a full 1920 pixels wider than it needed to be now that I'm only using two displays instead of three. So, I popped it into Photoshop and resized it for two
displays.

Since then (~24 hours) the problem hasn't happened. Perhaps I've found a solution; I don't know, but I'll be monitoring it (forgive the pun). If it does happen again, I'll resize the wallpaper to fit the 1080 height of the laptop and try that for a while.
If that doesn't work, I'll remove the wallpaper altogether—although this is a last resort since I'll have to save yet another theme to accommodate the lack of wallpaper.

 

Spontaneous Theme Change

You did mention the external monitor in the q... and I think you may be right about it being behind this. I did a quick web search on that earlier on, but did not find anything that seemed relevant (although issues have been reported in connection with
using Google Chrome and two monitors) - however I certainly cannot replicate the issue in a single screen set-up so I'll bow out at this point, and hope that you can find a solution. - Regards, R.

 

I've had that with themes I've created, I just save the newly created theme (as it's exactly the same as my theme) & delete the original & usually that fixes it.

 

In my case, it doesn't. As stated in my original message, it keeps coming back. I delete it, switch to the theme I've created, and a while later (anywhere from a few minutes to a few days) another new unsaved theme is created and win10 switches to it. So, I go through it all again... and again... and again.

 

Yes, I wasn't sure whether you'd saved the theme before deleting the original.

 

I forgot to mention in my original post...

My preferred theme is different from the one spontaneously created by Windows 10, so just saving the new one and carrying on isn't something I want to do.

 

An update:

A few days ago, I realized my desktop wallpaper was far too big, area wise. I'll explain...

Originally, I had a three-display set-up, two external monitors and the laptop's screen. So, I was using a single wallpaper wide enough to cover all three. Now, there was an inherent problem with this right away because my external monitors were both 1920x1200 whereas the laptop screen is only 1920x1080. There was already some wallpaper "hanging off" the edge of the laptop screen.

Then one of my monitors died and I haven't replaced it. That meant my desktop wallpaper was now a full 1920 pixels too wide as well as being too tall for the laptop screen. So, I resized it, got rid of the extra width.

It took a couple of days for the mysterious theme-switch problem to happen again with the resized wallpaper, but oddly enough, there seems to be another wrinkle in all this. The problem cropped up again just before (or just after, or while) I was installing a demo version of CorelDraw X8 (not that I suspect it has anything to do directly with Corel's product, but it did bring back a vague memory of it happening around the time I was installing/uninstalling other software).

So, now I've removed the wallpaper altogether to see if that has any effect.

 

Okay, it's got nothing to do with wallpaper. The same thing happened yesterday with no wallpaper.



And it was right around the time I installed CrazyBump. So, I'm thinking now it has something to do with installers.

 

Do you have more than one PC? Perhaps it is syncing your theme...

 

There is a second PC, and my login over there even has a similar theme, but I don't think so. The second PC keeps its theme exactly the way I want it whenever I'm logged in over there. Maybe it's somehow syncing with my wife's theme when she logs in? But, no, that doesn't make sense because the switch has happened several times when she's at work and her PC is sitting on the login screen.

At this point, I'm pretty sure it's connected to running an installer... and whatever's causing the switch doesn't appear to be picky; it does it when just about any installer is run.