Lose ablitiy to click in application window with Windowblinds running

Published on August 15, 2005 By essjae In Object Desktop

Hi,

With WindowBlinds running, occasionally a window will no longer be clickable. Clicking on the window does nothing, if there is another window open behind it, it will be brought to the front. This happens most commonly with IE and Word. The IE/Word doc can no longer be clicked in, but you can still type in a word doc. When this happens, area in the the corners of the window between the rounded window skin and the actual square corner will turn pink.

The window can be closed via the taskbar, and reopened. However, this seems to happen more and more frequently in a session. Closing Windowblinds resolves the issue.

I just built a brand new system with a new install of Windows and my Windowblinds and it started this behavior within hours of the new install.

The systems are completely different machines. One has an ATI card, one nVidia, so it doesn't seem like a video driver issue.

Anyone got any hints? If I can't resolve the issue, I'm going to have to dump Windowblinds, because closing/reopening apps is impacting my work.

Same behavior occurs on ver 4.51 and 4.60. OS is XP Pro SP2.

Thanks
SJ

Comments

Bichur

on Aug 15, 2005

got no solution - but - had some issues before with some applications (they didn't like being skinned) so, on those I excluded them in the per application section of configure. Spent some time every once and a while til I found a skin that either worked {in which case I would set that application to use only that skin) or I would just skin the title bar. Sometimes it seems some of the older skins work better on some applications. 2 that have give me the least trouble are Antares and Alien Technology - there are probably others, these were in my list.

essjae

on Aug 15, 2005

Thanks. I'll try excluding IE, Word and Outlook.

today for the first time, Outlook exhibited the behavior

Lantec

on Aug 16, 2005

This is the only time I've heard of this happening. I tend to think it's not Windowblinds related. If it was a bug I know we'd have seen a lot of threads as many, many, many people use MS Office products.
I would recommend a couple checks. You may have a mouse driver that conflicts somehow with WB. Check that yours is up to date. You didn't mention what version of office you run, but you may want to check on the Office Update feature at MS to make sure you have the latest updates for your version. I've had 2000 and I now use 2003 and both work great. Lastly, you may have a bad or incomplete install of WB. It may help to uninstall and reinstall to be sure.

In some of the older versions I had to put programs in the exclusion list, but since version 3.5 or so the only program listed is skinstudio (by default)

essjae

on Aug 17, 2005

Lantec,

Hmm, now that you mention it, I think I only started seeing this problem after I got my Razer Plasma mouse. Of course, it was on both my old machine and I moved it to my new machine.

I'm running Office 2K3 SP1, and I used that for a while with WB with 0 problems. The only major change was the Razer mouse and drivers.

Thanks for the inspiration.
SJ

Lantec

on Aug 17, 2005

You might want to use the generic MS driver with your mouse, unless you lose some particular function you bought it for.

essjae

on Aug 18, 2005

I've removed the Razer drivers and I'll see what happens. I hope that this is the solution so I can be done with it, but it seems hard to believe that no one else is using a Razer mouse and Windowblinds.

I'll post back in with the results.

Thx
SJ

essjae

on Sep 13, 2005

Well, after removing the drivers, the behavior occurs much less frequently, its happened 3-4 times since I posted. There's still something going on though, maybe some piece of the Razer drivers is still installed.

It seems that the problem is starting to occur more and more and it happened 2x today.

essjae

on Mar 29, 2006

After updating to WindowBlinds 5.0x, and various betas of 5, the problem still occurs. IE and Word are still the two major apps. I found a .sys file left behind by the Razer drivers and removed it. Problem still occurs.

It seems that the only way to get rid of this behavior may be to do a fresh install of Windows XP.

That time is still a ways off.

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