This paper studies the disturbance decoupling problem by dynamic output feedback with required closed-loop stability, in the general case of nonstrictly-proper systems. We will show that the extension of the geometric solution based on the ideas of self boundedness and self hiddenness presents structural differences with respect to the strictly proper case. The most crucial aspect that emerges in the general case is the issue of the well-posedness of the feedback interconnection, which obviously has no counterpart in the strictly proper case. A fundamental property of the feedback interconnection that has so far remained unnoticed in the literature is investigated in this paper: the well-posedness condition is decoupled from the remaining solvability conditions. An important consequence of this fact is that the well-posedness condition written with respect to the supremal output nulling and infimal input containing subspaces does not need to be modified when we consider the solvability conditions of the problem with internal stability (where one would expect the well-posedness condition to be expressed in terms of supremal stabilizability and infimal detectability subspaces), and also when we consider the solution which uses the dual lattice structures of Basile and Marro. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.