
Being a BeOS user (a purely desktop system) and because I code under Linux, I see
XFree86 (v4.1 on my machine) as a user and as a developper. And this is where the problem lies. My Gnome or KDE desktops are slow in comparison with other operating systems, but XFree86, the 'engine' behind these desktops, proves me that it's not. Let's look at what I have in front of me: a dual Pentium III at 933Mhz with 512MB of memory, a Radeon 32 AIW, a modified Mandrake 8.0 powered by kernel 2.4.18.
> After days of checking my code without results,
> I tried to put all frames of the knob into one larger picture! And it worked ...
Not a huge surprise, there are various hard limits in Windows on the number of windows and GDI objects, both globally and per-process. The actual limits vary from version to version.
MS introduced the imagelist control with win95 to help get around exactly this problem.