Analysis of dwm.exe

This post encompasses an analysis of the dwm.exe process.

The dwm.exe process is the window manager that gives opened windows their translucent and other visual effects such as live taskbar thumbnails. The OS actually writes a picture of the window to memory and creates a composite view of all the windows on the screen before sending them to be viewed on the monitor. This allows the OS to use video card hardware acceleration to create very smooth animations for actions such as minimizing and restoring windows, and even transparency effects.

I was able to kill the process via the task manager. I had to kill it twice to actual get it to stop. After killing the process the windows I had opened simply defaulted to the "Basic Windows Theme" option as if I had made that selection in the control panel. You can also permanently disable the process by double clicking the process and in the general tab select the start up type as "Disabled."