Possibly this is expected, but...

[John Vokey]

I run all my stacks *as stacks* in the MetaCard IDE: that is, I do not  
create standalones.  I sent a series of my stacks to a colleague to  
use, pointing him to StackRunner to download to run my stacks.  They  
ran in a sense, but not completely.  In particular, all the subsidiary  
materials (image files, sound files, etc.) for the stacks are  
contained in either the same directory containing the stack or in a  
sub-directory, and none of these would load when run with StackRunner,  
but work just fine in the IDE (and the RR IDE, as well).  I set the  
path(s) to these subsidiary materials in an openCard handler of the  
first card of the stacks, similar to the following:

global thePath,tonepath,datapath,numblocks,theTrials

on openCard
   --
   --  Get/Set Paths
   --
   put the filename of this stack into thePath
   set the itemdelimiter to "/"
   delete the last item of thePath
   set the filename of image "theback" to thePath&"/ 
N44NNBWeb2_goldman.jpg"
   put thePath&"/data/" into datapath
   put thePath&"/tones/" into tonepath
end openCard

which, as I said, works fine in the IDE.

To make a long story short, I tracked the problem down to a  
preopenStack handler of the stack script:

on preopenStack
   set the loc of me to the screenloc--centre stack
   set the fixstack of this stack to false
   hide menubar
   set the decorations of this stack to empty
   set the backdrop to black
   hide stack "Home"
   hide message
end preopenStack

*Any* preopenstack handler.  That is, the existence of the  
preopenstack handler appears to block the generation of the openCard  
handler, but only in StackRunner (and in a standalone, if I create  
one), but NOT in either the two IDEs.  If I remove the preopenstack  
handler, everything runs just fine (and the same) in the IDEs and  
StackRunner.

I think this is a serious bug (and I'll never recover the hours it  
took to track down), but perhaps others have some good explanation for  
this marked difference in behaviour between the IDEs and standalones?   
Incidentally, passing the preopenstack message at the end of the  
preopenstack handler changes nothing: it still works as expected in  
the IDEs, but the openCard script is not triggered in StackRunner.

--
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html>

-Dr. John R. Vokey