We've had a few customers experience an issue with the thumbnails or layouts in the main editing screen turning black. This has mainly occurred with 64bit versions of Windows XP/Vista/7.

This fixed the problem by changing the Compatibility mode for the editor to Windows XP (Service Pack 2).

If you're not sure how to do this, please follow the below instructions:

If you have an icon for our editor on your desktop, right click on it and select 'Properties'; otherwise locate the editor in the start menu, right click on it then select 'Properties'. The top of the box will have three tabs, 'General', 'Shortcut' and 'Compatibility'. Select the 'Compatibility' tab. There will then be a 'Compatibility Mode' section. Please tick this box, then in the drop down menu, set it to 'Windows XP (Service Pack 2)'. Click 'Apply' then 'OK'.

We would suggest to restart your computer then for the change to take full effect. Some customers have reported that after making this change, they have needed to right click on the thumbnails at the bottom and select 'Refresh' also which has cleared the issue fully for them.