Windows Misery

[Graham Samuel]

Hi

I've asked about this before, but as I'm desperate I thought I'd try once more.

I have an app in an advanced state of preparation - it's been through a 
thorough beta test and I was left with just one error. This was the one 
where I had two buttons whose icons were animated GIFs, where one of the 
buttons consistently stopped animating when the two buttons overlapped. I 
found a fix for this, but have no idea why it worked - I moved the animated 
GIFs from the card they were on to the card which the user sees (the one 
with the buttons on it). I then set the coordinates of these GIFs to 
(-10000,-10000) in order to make sure the user never sees them. All this 
worked fine on all the platforms I usually test on (MacOS 9.2.2, MacOSX, 
Windows XP), but it appears to crash and/or mess up the display when run on 
Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME. This didn't happen with earlier 
versions of the app.

I have worked hard to try to isolate this problem, including generating a 
whole external logging scheme to keep track of the program execution, but I 
don't seem to be getting anywhere - it looks as if the app crashes near the 
beginning while opening some substacks (usually invisible). I've tried 
bringing the GIFs back into the visible area of the screen but this hasn't 
stopped the crashing... I just have no idea where to go now to get a 
solution. I've tried asking the RR team directly (I think as an original 
holder of a 'pro' licence I am entitled to help for some incidents) but no 
reply so far.

Can anyone think of a way I could even approach the source of the problem? 
My users (schools) have a wide variety of Windows machines, and although I 
guess I could demand that they don't use W95, I really don't think I could 
cut out 98 and certainly not ME.

TIA

Graham

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Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France