Disappearing Programs

[Drew]

I'm just curious if anyone else has had programs 'disappear' on their computer. About 8 months ago, I began to notice that when I opened a zip file, the Winzip 'warning' would open, but then when it closed, I would not have winzip open on my screen. It would be in the status bar, but to get it, I would have to right click on the status bar portion for Winzip, and click Maximize. Then it was there. If I clicked Normal, it would 'disappear' again. I had the same issue with Microsoft Photo Editor.

I had to rebuild my machine about 2 months ago, so it was a moot point. Then about a month ago, my brother reported a similar issue with a music making application he had. He didn't have any options off the shortcut menu from the status bar though. He could see it running in the status bar, but couldn't see the window anywhere. What he would do, was create a new profile, and run the program in there. Eventually that profile would corrupt, and he'd have to do that again, and again.

Well I came up with a temp solution. I wrote a little VB program that shows you all of the windows on your machine. It also lets you set various properties, like visible, Top, Right, Left, Bottom, etc. In the cases of the 'missing' programs, they all had extremely high (both positive and negative) positions, so they were simply 'off screen'. I was beginning to think it was an issue with multiple monitor setups (I have 3, and my brother used to have 2, but he was only using one when the problem was occurring). The other day though, I had someone I do contract development work for run into another 'bad coordinates' issue, and he wasn't on a multiple monitor machine. (Though it was a laptop, which may internally think it has two monitors (for external hookup)).

Is this an known issue, has anyone else run into it?

Drew

[jscher2000]

We use a VB program that stores its window positions in an Access 95-format database. On very rare occasions, the program will vanish due to bad coordinates and we have to use Excel to fix them (no one I know has Access 95, and updating the format would break the app). One user in particular who uses an extremely high screen resolution has had this a couple of times. I'm guessing the app makes some brain dead assumptions about maximum screen resolutions, causing it to compute its coordinates into never-never land. But I have no way to know.

The only other thought: There are some "minimize anything to the systray" programs that might use offscreen coordinates. I can't imagine you would have one installed by mistake, but it's another slim possibility.

[Drew]

Nope, I don't have anything like that installed. You should be able to connect to the 95 mdb using any version of Access (95 or later), by creating a blank 'new version' database, then create linked tables to the 95 .mdb.

Drew

[jscher2000]

> You should be able to connect to the 95 mdb using any version of Access ...[using] linked tables

That's a good idea. But we're pretty stingy with Office Pro; only about 20% of our desktops have Access. Everyone gets Excel, whether they want it or not. <img src=/S/grin.gif border=0 alt=grin width=15 height=15>

[Drew]

Ack, I'd take Access over Excel any day! <VBG>

You could get adventurous and write a small little VB program to edit the data. (Wouldn't even have to have an interface, just set the coordinates to something within an 800 by 600 range.)

Drew