When I run SL, using the official SL viewer or Firestorm (both current as of today, 12/1/2024), the viewer runs with a 3 pixel black gap between the bottom border of the viewer and the task bar. If I hide the task bar, this gap is between the bottom of the viewer and the bottom of the screen. This 3 pixel area collapses and pops back into existence, over and over. When it collapses, the entire viewer stretches down 3 pixels to cover the area. When the gap comes back, the entire viewer gets smushed upwards by the gap. The gap appears and disappears erratically. Sometimes it hits so fast it makes the screen flicker. Sometimes it just goes away for an hour or so. Usually, it just appears and disappears randomly. The only time it reliably happens is during login. The viewer will reliably jump and flicker, at least a few times, during login.

This is difficult to describe, so I tried to take a video of it, but OBS does not show the jump when I try to record it. It's also very difficult to describe, so I made a GIF of this issue by screen capping the viewer, then manually removing the 3 pixel bottom border, and stretching the portion of the image, to recreate the jump. I used these two images to make a GIF to depict that I'm seeing. Imgur transcoded my GIF into mp4, but it still gets the point across.

If you look at this zoom in of the portion of the bottom edge of the viewer, you can see the 3 pixel border that is going to collapse and make everything jump.

I am running windows 11 on a 2 week old MSI laptop. My BIOS and drivers are all up to date. My laptop specs can be found here:

The about window on the viewer says the viewer is using the RTX 4060 graphics card, not the integrated graphics.

This only happens with SL viewers. No other video games or programs have this issue.

In the viewer, I have tried turning on only the most basic graphics settings, and then I tried most advanced ultra graphics settings, and that does not effect the problem. I had a program called Windhawk installed on this laptop, that made my start menu like the windows 10 start menu, so I uninstalled that, and that didn't fix it. I fiddled with the task bar settings, and that did not help. Hiding the task bar makes the viewer jump between the edge of the screen and 3 pixels up, instead of between the task bar and 3 pixels up, so that didn't help. I have a second monitor that I use sometimes, and the problem still happens on the second monitor.

Current fix: I run SL windowed, and not maximized. I stretch the window to cover the screen, so it looks maximized, but it is not maximized. It doesn't jump when run like this.

I posted this issue on the SL forums, and another user posted that they have had this same issue, with this same graphics card, for months. Here is my forum post:

When I asked in world firestorm support, they told me to report the issue here.