I have ran into what I consider to be a progress bar bug on Windows 7. To demonstrate the bug I created a WinForm application with a button and a progress bar. In the button's 'on-click' handle I have the following code.

private void buttonGo_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  this.progressBar.Minimum = 0;
  this.progressBar.Maximum = 100;

  this.buttonGo.Text = "Busy";
  this.buttonGo.Update();

  for (int i = 0; i <= 100; ++i)
  {
    this.progressBar.Value = i;
    this.Update();

    System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10);
  }

  this.buttonGo.Text = "Ready";
}

The expected behavior is for the progress bar to advance to 100% and then the button text to change to 'Ready'. However, when developing this code on Windows 7, I noticed that the progress bar would rise to about 75% and then the button text would change to 'Ready'. Assuming the code is synchronous, this should not happen!

On further testing I found that the exact same code running on Windows Server 2003 produced the expected results. Furthermore, choosing a non aero theme on Windows 7 produces the expected results.

In my mind, this seems like a bug. Often it is very hard to make a progress bar accurate when the long operation involves complex code but in my particular case it was very straight forward and so I was little disappointed when I found the progress control did not accurately represent the progress.

Has anybody else noticed this behavior? Has anybody found a workaround?