OS X 10.4.3 Redraw Problems

I upgraded my laptop to OS X 10.4.3 the other day, and immediately upon reboot I started seeing massively annoying redraw problems. Windows would randomly get redrawn with part of another window on the screen, dock icons would be replaced by images found elsewhere on the screen. It was almost unusable.

I did some searches to find others afflicted by the same problem, and only found this post on a message board, which didn't have any answers or solutions.

So I started reading more about 10.4.3, and found out that it breaks support for Quartz 2D Extreme. Which is strange in and of itself, because I thought Quartz 2D Extreme was something new in Tiger—so why would they break it in a maintenance release for Tiger?

Anyway, everything I read suggested that Q2DE was disabled by default unless it was supported by the video card. There are hacks to turn it on even on machines that don't support it, but I'd never done that.

But I figured I'd check, so I opened up the CoreGraphics configuration file, and astonishingly, Q2DE was enabled! So I disabled it, rebooted, and the problem was solved.

If you're having the same problems with 10.4.3, here's what to do:

1. Open up the file /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/ Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Configuration.plist in a text editor.
2. Look for the lines:

   
       <key>Quartz2DExtremeEnabled</key>
       <true/>
   
   

3. Change the "<true/>" to "<false/>".
4. Save the file, and reboot. That should fix the redraw problems.