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

[Roger Darlington]

On 16 Nov 2010, Jeremy Nicoll - ml virtualacorn  wrote:
> Chris Hughes <chris at noonehere.co.uk> wrote:

>> yes there is away out of this. Press ALT-ENTER/RETURN key together
>> this pushes the VA full screen into a normal Winodws window and then
>> do ALT -ENTER/RETURN again and you are back to normal. Its some
>> background task on windows causing issuew (Zone Alarm was a regular
>> cause of this or some other urgent update notification)

> If you get to VA/VRPC running in a window then you've access to the windows
> menus along the top and one of those has power on, hard reset and break
> options for the emulator.

In this particular case, I don't think any of those options would have 
helped, since I think RO the program emulator was completely dead. But 
without the faulty condition here now to test, I cannot really know 
that until it happens again.


> I've posted here before on why I think it's better to run VRPC in a window
> insteasd of full-screen - precisely of this kind of problem.  The underlying
> OS needs to be able to attract you attention when eg a firewall ora/v
> program produces an alert.

Yes, I came across that posting a few days ago Jeremy.

> And it's sensible not to fool yourself into thinking you're running an Acorn
> machine - it's an emulation.  You need to be at least moderately aware of
> the underlying windows environment.  Lots of users don't seem to accept
> this, and have problems as a consequence.


>>> The only thing I can seem to do in this situation is to CTRL-ALT-DEL.
>>> Not a very satisfactory state of affairs.

> But even if you do that you should get Windows' Task Manager at the first
> stage rather than have the machine reboot.  Although that gives you the
> chance to end processes etc the real significance is it gives you back
> control to the other windows apps so you can sort out whatever windows app
> is causing the 'problem' in the first place.  Once sorted you can switch
> back into VRPC.

>> Its not a bug really but an interaction between Windows and a full
>> screen VA windows application. VA is just an application running on
>> Windows.

> Indeed.  It worries me that Roger is having so many problems that others
> don't see.  Why?

I'm a RO power user that doesn't really know how to work windows :-)

Does that mean that no one has ever seen the condition I described 
(way above) where the RO window is just a ghost temporarily hiding all 
the active Windows things underneath it until a mouse button is 
pressed when the active windows underneath are very very briefly 
(about 1 scan-frame period) visible? If so, I am surprised.



-- 

Cheers
Roger