I noticed after installing SqlDeveloper on a new Windows 7 install that running it caused the Aero 7 interface to fail. Although I haven’t proved it, I remember that older versions of Java had compatibility issues with Vista causing the OS to turn off the Aero interface, think it was linked to swing using the direct draw interface in combination with some older windows UI interfaces breaking Vista. Anyway they fixed most of the versions of Java to work with Vista and the issue went away.
The same issue appears to happen when SqlDeveloper runs. I’m guessing that its got an old version of the JRE which hasn’t got the fix in to work with Vista. So I stopped the issue by replacing SqlDevelopers JRE folder with the latest JRE from Sun.
The following steps solve the problem:
- Install the latest JRE from Sun, I’ve got 1.6.0_16, just go to www.java.com for that. I suspect the latest version of 1.5 will work to.
- Rename C:\Program Files\sqldeveloper\jdk\jre to C:\Program Files\sqldeveloper\jdk\jre_old (just in case)
- On 32bit Windows, Copy C:\Program Files\Java\jre6 to C:\Program Files\sqldeveloper\jdk\jre (you must remove the 6 from the end of JRE)
- On 64bit windows Copy C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6 to C:\Program Files\sqldeveloper\jdk\jre (you must remove the 6 from the end of JRE)
Run SQL Developer and Aero should still be enabled.
One issue you might have is that you copied a server JRE to the SqlDeveloper folder. SqlDeveloper directly invokes the client hotspot JRE and will just show an error dialog box if the client hotspot doesn’t exist, which it doesn’t if you only have a server JRE which is the case for the x64 version of it. Check that the folder ‘C:\Program Files\sqldeveloper\jdk\jre\bin\client’ exists.