Thankfully, others have experienced this as well, but suddenly I had a weird issue with trying to run Expression Blend from my Macbook Air, which hosts a Windows 7 installation under Parallels. When I would run it, it would look like it was running under 4-bit graphics or something, and totally unusable.
Apparently, it is due to how WPF apps (which I take Expression is, though I haven’t had a problem with Visual Studio 2010, which I think is a WPF app as well) work with hardware acceleration in this environment. In any event, the fix is fairly simple.
- Open up regedit
- Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft
- Create a new key called Avalon.Graphics
- Create a new DWord value called DisableHWAcceleration and give it a value of 1
- Restart Expression Blend
Works for me.