Docker, Windows Server 2025 and garbled text

Operating Systems & Open Source Virtualization
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Let’s try this topic again!

I’ve been encountering into weird bugs on Windows Server 2025 (as if they weren’t shoving AI code nowadays into everything). One of these is that I can see all the Ethernet Adapters created by Docker Engine with a big case of an extremely garbled text, and I’m not sure why this happens. If you use Powershell to see these adapters, they all seem fine:

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I’m investigating this as a potential source of Blue Screens currently. Any hints would be greatly appreciated!

Furthermore, I am also keeping this as a blog of sorts to troubleshoot this topic.

Edit: I know I could do all of this in Linux, please don’t reiterate that. It’s not the point of this question.

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Genuinely curious, why do you pay for Windows server to run containers? Linux does this for free, with much fewer headaches.

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License cost $20 or so

Windows offers much faster SMB with RDMA support, Linux not even close in terms of performance

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This is not a Windows vs Linux topic. I have a very specific question, and I would like help to resolve that.

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I think it could be just a visual bug in Windows. I remember seeing somewhere a Windows 10 update (not the same I know, but close enough) that had troubles representing “TB” as in “terabytes of storage” in the Windows Settings app showing garbled text. All that to say that Windows is not new to issues in proper text display.
I know it’s not the best course of action but until you see anything weird happening I’d just ignore that and hope for an update that will fix the issue.

P.S. what you could do to check if it’s just a visual bug is changing the adapter name and copy the string of text related to the adapter in Notepad++ or a similar tool. That should tell you if there are weird characters mixed in there or not.

P.P.S. a Superuser post referring to it as a visual bug, as I suspected.

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Interesting - been searching this for a while and it’s the first time I’ve seen that one post lol. I can guarantee that it happens on Windows Server 2025 latest updates at of today too…
In that case, my crashes have nothing to do with this lol.

Thanks for the note!! :slight_smile:

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No problem. Went more broadly looking for “Windows” issues rather than focusing on Window Server so maybe that helped me find a possible explaination.

You’ve been having issues? What’s in the Event Viewer?

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Can you copy the literal names in a comment here? Since only part of the name is corrupted, I wonder if the corrupted part corresponds to something meaningful in different Unicode encodings. Since it is so consistantly corrupted in the same part of the name, it could code that is using the string as a pointer to a structure member to write a value into the string.

And I assume you did a memtest or are using ECC etc etc…? :slight_smile:

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Blue screens with win32k.sys and the processor being on an idle state - and I can’t find any reason through WinDbg. Happen daily with all Core Isolation enabled, but infrequent without it. First time diving that far into the kernel, but that warrants its own separate thread.

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Yeah it’s truly a visualization issue here: this is the literal text that is presented on the Properties dialog for example: Hyper-V Virtual Ethernet Container Adapter #4. But the overall view is bugged up:

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As for a memtest - I did run the Windows built in memory tester, which is usually fine. Don’t have ECC, but given everything around this, this is not the bug that’s burning my setup right now.

Edit: If you want to see what I am actually struggling with, you can take a peek here!