Have you seen the Vista purple screen of death?

We are no strangers to the Blue Screen of Death; who hasn't seen it in the Win98 era? And some people have even encountered a rare version of system crash: the Red Screen of Death, which is quite uncommon. But, have you ever heard of a "Purple Screen" crash?

Interestingly enough, as shown in the image above, this situation cannot be fully referred to as a purple screen—it's only a partial purple screen. However, this phenomenon is already quite rare. Unlike the typical blue screen or red screen, it does not lead to a system crash and reboot. Instead, it results from low-level (not simple) errors in the system kernel, which are not as severe. So, how does this happen?

This occurs when the WDDM driver partially crashes and the DWM cannot respond properly. It’s a very rare issue and is a unique phenomenon caused by the Windows Vista display system. This can happen on both ATI and Nvidia graphics cards.