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Those black boxes are there because the GPU rendering context that the dropdowns use has been released by the driver. If the application tries to continue to use it, it doesn't crash - it just gets back a zero-d out chunk of bytes. I.e. black.
That rendering context can be prematurely released under multiple conditions.
One of them is a (partial) driver crash or hang and the Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) emergency mechanism kicking in to perform a (partial) driver reset. (TDR was originally invented to prevent full hangs from leaving users with non-interactive desktop environments. But since then drivers got pretty smart about resetting only the 'stuck' parts.)
The system going into sleep or hibernate and powering down the video card, is another reason.
In both cases, the application receives messages from the Windows OS that tell it the GPU driver has been reset or has been reinitialized after resuming from sleep. But it has to handle those and accordingly recreate new rendering contexts.
Chromium itself nominally does do that correctly. But if you embedded Chromium via e.g. CEF then things get complicated because of how Chromium is no longer the top-level application capable of managing its own window and its own rendering contexts. The embedding application needs to handle part of the workload.
And Valve doesn't handle all of it correctly. Which isn't exactly a new issue: they never handled it correctly. Not since the first versions of the Steam client that started embedding Chromium. Look back through the forums for all the bug reports and complaints of black screen problems. 80-90% of those are due to these type of rendering context problems. These span literal decades. One of the longest ongoing problems with Steam and one that will likely never be fully fixed.
I only see this issue if both of the following are true.
1) Using Multiple monitors
2) Windows is configured in power options to turn off the display after a set time. It seems I see this issue after windows has powered off the display and I've come back to my PC and Windows has powered back on the display.
What this means is if I have a single monitor OR if I configure windows to not power off the monitors the issue doesn't happen.
Workarounds:
1) Use a single monitor
or
2) In power options disable turning off the monitor.
Start -> Control Panel -> Power Options
Change Plan Settings
Turn off the display: Never
You can then configure a screensaver to protect the monitor. I use blank
I also noticed that not all the boxes are black, for instance, the community box is visible now.
Windows 11.
Dual monitor setup:
-Main monitor KOORUI Gaming 27E3Q.
-Secondary (vertical) monitor Acer QG241Y P.
GPU: RX6700xt - Adrenaline 24.8.1.
Causes of the issue on my side (needs both to occur):
-Windows scale (Display Settings > Scale) of display set to 125% (Does not occur when set at 100%).
-Displays turning off automatically.
I hope this information will help with fixing this issue.
A workaround: setting the same resolution on the secondary display as on the main display using Dynamic/Virtual Super Resolution.