Yesterday after playing with my legacy family and taking several screen captures, I checked my Screen Shots folder where Gadwin stores my screens and noticed that all of them were just a black screen with nothing on them. I checked the screens I took before and noticed that while some were okay, others showed either the black screen or the same screen shot over and over again. I also tried using the Print Screen key but that also showed a black screen. I couldn't figure out what could be causing this, as I checked several threads that mentioned Desktop Composition and Hardware Acceleration and nothing seemed to work. Then I remembered that just recently I noticed my graphics card could handle Smooth Edges and had actually turned the option all the way to More. I did various tests and I finally figured that, for some reason, I can't take screen shots while Smooth Edges is set to anything other than Less. So I'd like to know if this is something I can fix or change, as I would like to keep my settings to More but also take screen shots, since the ones captured within the game are just not good enough.

Gadwin is notorious for messing with pictures and causing black screenshots. You can try to set it to 'full screen' in the settings, which may or may not work. Same with desktop composition. I don't think the Gadwin problems have anything to do with smooth edges. I've had the problem with XP and Vista, and it probably also persists in Win7 and 8, but I used windowed from the beginning with Win 7.

The only permanent solution I found was to start playing windowed, and Gadwin hasn't caused any problems since, except for me forgetting to start it up once in a while. Now I usually take a screenshot before I go ingame, to make sure it's working.

There's a bit of screen in the background of my pictures (widescreen...) but if you set the window as close to your screen size as possible, it's not that different from full-screen. Bonus for being able to check internet pages and search folders while playing the game or while it loads, without having to go back to the desktop to do so.

It's more Windows' fault than Gadwin's - as OP experienced the printscreen key has the same problem. Unfortunately that means that there isn't really a software solution, just a bunch of workarounds like using windowed mode.

I use Gadwin and I noticed that when I'm playing The Sims (and sometimes when I'm doing other stuff) , Gadwin lags a bit before taking its shot so you get something that was a few seconds or so after you clicked printscreen. As in with the Sims, you get the black screen as the game/s hitting the taskbar. If you had your game paused, you can line it up again for a second shot.