Still an ongoing issue on my Windows 7 x64 installation.

OpenGL doesn't render if desktop window manager window compositing (fancy 3d window styling) is turned off.

Some other applications have also had problems with this, and I thought it's a Windows bug, however, it is starting to look like it is a documented feature change.

I need to have openGL rendering without desktop composition.

So far, I could ask if the following information is related to the problem?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18477852/c-opengl-window-only-tracks-back...

And an extract from the above document:

On Windows Vista and newer Windows operating systems, there is a component known as the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) which has a special mode called "Desktop Composition" that draws windows into offscreen buffers and then composites them. It does this to provide new visual effects such as live window previews in the Alt+Tab screen.

A consequence of this new architecture is that you cannot draw single buffered applications (in windowed mode anyway) the same way you could in Windows XP (or in Windows Vista+ with Desktop Composition disabled). In a nutshell, the DWM uses a copy of your render context's back buffer for composition. You should switch to double buffered drawing.

To use double buffered drawing in GLUT, you would use GLUT_DOUBLE instead of GLUT_SINGLE in your call to glutInitDisplayMode (...). Additionally, you need to replace your calls to glFlush (...) with glutSwapBuffers (...).