A man goes to see his doctor. He says “Doctor, every time I bend my right arm I get a sharp pain.” The doctor responds “Then stop bending your right arm!” Not the best advice to be sure. Well, Microsoft is giving the same advice to some of it’s Vista users.

Knowledgebase article KB932519 is titled “You may experience poor video playback performance when a tooltip appears in the video playback area on a computer that is running Windows Vista”. It suggests that for users of Vista Home Basic, or users of other versions where their hardware doesn’t allow Aero to run, they may have poor video performance at times. This poor video performance is linked to the appearance of a tooltip in the video playback area while video is playing. There are many reasons a tooltip might appear, with the most notable being the presence of your cursor moving over the Play, Pause, Fast forward or Rewind controls of Windows Media Player. The problem is described as a ’sudden’ reduction in performance, lost frames, or poor video performance, especially on slower CPU hardware.

Luckily, Microsoft has a workaround. The workaround for this problem as posted on the knowledgebase article is:

To work around this behavior, do not move the mouse pointer over any area of the video playback program while you watch a video. By not moving the mouse pointer over this area, you prevent a tooltip from appearing.

Will there be a ‘fix’ for this? Microsoft has confirmed that it is a problem, but the workaround is so effective that perhaps a fix isn’t needed. What if you’re watching the video full screen, and any number of other automated tooltips appear above your taskbar? Well, the fix for that is simple, don’t view the video. By not viewing the video, you prevent the degradation in performance caused by the tooltip!