[Virtualacorn-list] Windows panes flashing under dead full-screen RO

[Jeremy Nicoll - ml virtualacorn]

Roger Darlington <rogerarm at freeuk.com> wrote:

[sourceforge]

> I mean that it might be the apps themselves that are not so stable as 
> one might assume.

One shouldn't assume they're all stable, or more to the point that their
authors' idea of 'stable coincides with yours.  SourceForge is just a
repository for thousands of open-source programming projects.  Like
everything else some of them have expert programmers who attend to every
detail... and some don't.

A better way to assess how reliable a program hosted there is, is to see how
much that program is recommended by people (eg in newsgroups / mailing lists
of people interested in that area of use), and to look at the forums and
bug-tracker for a project.  You want to know how much Q&A is going on - is
the project still alive - are bugs that people report either being fixed or
at least discussed, and so on.  


For the problems you're having, I'd be less interested in what other
application programs you're running, and more interested in systemy things -
anti-virus, anti-malware programs especially any that have a 'resident'
componet that's supposedly monitoring your machine at every instant. What
firewall you use - some don't just monitor internet traffic but also what
programs are (say) asking other programs what they can do.  For example you
may (naturally) allow a browser to talk to the outside world - but if an
arbitary app tries to ask the browser to do something a firewall may ask you
if that's ok - it's NOT the same as you choosing to start the browser
yourself.

The Windows firewall (under XP anyway) only protect against incoming
traffic; although it can produce a log file that as far as I know only logs
/successful/ connections and some othe rpositive data - when what one really
wants to know is what's being blocked or failing to connect.  But other
firewalls go much further controlling outbound connections.  If, say, your
machine is infected with some malware that's talking to the outside world
you need to know - and you won't know unless you can see what apps are
allowed to make outbound connections.


> > As a last resort you can Ctrl-Alt-Delete for the Task manager and kill
> > the VRPC from there.
> 
> That is just what I said :-)
> we agree.
> But its still a nasty bug somewhere. One which I'd rather not have.

I don't think it necessarily is a bug.  I think there's an unreasonable
assumption on your part that you can ignore the underlying windows system.

-- 
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.