The lack of Unicode support in the helper window didn’t really cause a problem because the window never displayed any UI and never processed any text. Therefore, it was compiled as ANSI and consequently used the ANSI versions of functions like RegisterClass, like CreateWindow, and DefWindowProc to create and manage its helper window. Īt the time the GDI+ library was written, it needed to support Windows 98, which had very limited support for Unicode. Raymond Chen, one of my favorite Microsoft explainers, has a detailed (if weighty) discussion on the Developer Blog. It’s a bug in the way the Blocked Shutdown Resolver pulls the name of the program blocking a shutdown, and “G” may result when there’s a GDI+ program (a program that draws stuff on the screen) that turns belly up as you’re shutting down.

General consensus on Reddit, and elsewhere, is that the afflicted machines are running malware of some sort or another. I easily found six complaints on Reddit ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ) going back two years. In fact, people have been “reaching out” to Microsoft about this bug for years. We investigated and found an issue where windows related to GDI+were only referenced as “G.” We’ve fixed this, so going forward, these will now have the name “GDI+ Window ()”, where will show the.

Some of you have reached out about when trying to shutdown, seeing a message saying that an app named “G” was preventing shutdown. The KB article associated with the first Windows Insider beta build 19013 release says:

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