Ghost/stale image of MT4 Order Form border appearing on screen

I have a new Windows 11 Dell computer which is pretty fast (12th Gen Intel i9-12900K, 32G RAM, 2 SSD's). I like it, and with 16 cores/24 threads, I can run a lot more MT4's at once now, but there is one big drawback, which is that when I use the MT4 Order form to update the S/L or T/P, it leaves a ghost image / stale image / shadow image of the Order form border outline on the monitor screen. This is quite annoying because it obscures any other windows/apps that the stale image overlaps with.

The stale image cannot be moved. The buttons don't do anything. A click on the stale image is really a click on whatever is beneath it (even though you can't see it).

I can screen-shot capture the stale image(s). See below.

My MT4 is Version: 4.00 build 1353, 16 Dec 2021. (I think there's been 1-2 later updates but none of the brokers I'm using have pushed out any update yet).

Fyi, my guess is this is a bug with the graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti) but I have updated to the very latest drivers, first the one from Dell, and then a later one posted on Nvidia's site. (4/20/2022, 30.0.15.1259). I attach two 4K TV's (as monitors) to the graphics card, one via a direct HDMI, the other with a DVI-HDMI cable. They sync at 30Hz which is fine for my needs.

I've not seen this stale image problem with any other app besides MT4 (e.g. Word, Excel, Chrome, Edge, various other utilities).

Of course I tried quitting all MT4's but that didn't help. I've tried changing various "System->Display" settings, and power-cycling the TV's, but nothing I've tried -- short of a full PC reboot -- seems to help.

The image below has 2 stale images, and the real Order form on the bottom. The bid/price tick charts are only present on the real form. The stale forms have only the banner, and some lingering pixels of the frame.


If anybody has seen this problem, please let me know if you found any solutions, or even a workaround to clear the image without a reboot. If so, please describe your graphics card and Windows version, MT4 version, etc.

Thanks in advance for any help.

P.S. I have a ~1 year old PC laptop with Windows 10. When I connect to the same two TV/monitors, I've never seen this issue, but of course the laptop has its own built-in graphics on the CPU chip, so it doesn't have the 3060 Ti graphics card. That, and Windows 11, are the two biggest differences.

I guess MT4 isn't yet fully 'compatible' with the new Windows 11.

It would be a good idea to report the issue in the MQL5 forum so they can look at the problem (if any).

I'm using mt4 in different machines with windows 11 without issues. Precisely i have one with same 3060TI card ( develop system ) using 3 monitors ( 2 dp and 1 hdmi ). Maybe is a windows conflict with some driver. But its difficult know. Did you try make a clean install?

Thanks for your responses...

I started a new MQL5 forum thread here. The first suggestion given is to try running MT4 using the compatibility mode. I've not needed to before but it's something to try. (And "MT4 is unsupported" so the chances of getting updates for Windows 11 are limited; I suppose it depends how many people this affects).

Glad to hear it! Can you please comment on which driver version you're using for your 3060 Ti? Maybe the latest two drivers I tested have this problem, but if yours is older, I could try it. (The 1st one I tried was ~March 2022).

Regarding my PC installation, the Windows 11 came with it and it installed fresh when I turned it on. I added Office 365 and various other apps. I did install at least one copy of MT4 (and MT5 for testing) fresh, but most of my MT4 folders are just copied from my old PC. When I run each MT4, I "pin" the icons to the task bar, AND for each, I edit the properties so the terminal.exe executable uses the " /portable" option, which I prefer, and have had no problems with for years.

Today, I decided to do a generic MT4 fresh installation of the very latest build 1356, which I started up. I then started up the ~4 other MT4's I normally run at once, and the more I run, I *think* that this stale image is more likely to occur.

The new build could open orders, and then "Modify" the same orders without causing the ghost image, however, I also opened live orders with my two usual brokers and neither one of them caused the stale image problem... YET! It doesn't happen every single time, but the next time it does, I'll open up this MT4 Generic installation as well and see if it also has the problem. Same with my other many demo MT4's I have ready to run.

I can also try the "compatibility mode" as suggested on the MQL5 forum post.

By the way, I have just 1 of my MT4's that I run on a OneDrive "disk", therefore it constantly uploads/downloads the files to keep them in the cloud. (This includes the log, as well as the history files as they write to the disk). Therefore, the MQL4/{Indicators,Scripts,etc.} projects that I'm working on have continuous backups in the cloud. However, most of my MT4's, including my "live" account ones just use a local SSD disk. It would be WAY too much thrashing to update to the cloud for every MT4, so I avoid that.

That said, even the one MT4 using the cloud may be slowing down my system. There are times that the taskbar seems to hang for more than just a few seconds. There are reports of "slow" problems by other users of Windows 11 and OneDrive. So another test I can do is to not run any MT4 using OneDrive, and see if that helps. (I still have other files on OneDrive that will be active, like Excel / Word / etc. docs, but there would be very little network traffic for most or all of these).

Thanks again for your comments and help.

Im using last 512.77. But I have card since March then all prev drivers worked well. Honestly I dont think is a graphic card problem. This kind of problems should happen in all app because windows drawing is same API for all apps.

I dont install MT4, i make folder copy but I dont use portable mode. Anyway that is not the problem. I'm sure

I can tell you windows 10/11 are same internally. Then no reason for windows 11 can be the problem. Evidently something it must be wrong in your installation. Not idea with this information but you should try a clean install. Many times something hidden can break installation even you didnt do anything wrong. I had reinstall Windows because store stop to work after a windows update. Its the pain you have suffer for to use windows