Very curious...
Apr. 10th, 2013 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpI've looked around on the Web to see if there's any good info about a problem I've been having, in which double-clicked applications get to a point where some number of kilobytes—typically 104 KB, but sometimes 106 KB or 108 KB—of memory have been allocated, and then... nothing. The amount of memory used by the application does not increase (so naturally, it doesn't appear on the screen), and double-clicking the application again will start another copy of the application, which gets to the same point and stalls.
Most of the chatter I've found is associated with people who run into this problem when attempting to run Firefox, but I don't run Firefox. Despite that, over the past couple of days, I've run into the problem soon after my machine has finished its startup routine, which is not terribly encouraging if you consider that the only "cure" I've found to this problem is to reboot the machine. I do have better things to do.
Then something I caught "out of the corner of my screen" while browsing potential solutions turned out to be a huge help and points directly at Windows 7 as the culprit (as far as I can tell).
Programs can successfully be invoked from a command prompt. I therefore conclude that there is a serious problem with the mechanism by which the OS turns a double-click into a running application. (FWIW, hitting return after highlighting a file in a directory window doesn't work, either).
More research is required, but at least I have a workaround that won't force me to reboot if this phenomenon raises its ugly head at a particularly inconvenient time!
UPDATE (and data point): Thunderbird allows me to open email attachments by right-clicking them, and doing so on a Word file has just successfully opened an attached file in Word. Therefore, an application can open another application, too. Just can't double-click on it, is all...
Most of the chatter I've found is associated with people who run into this problem when attempting to run Firefox, but I don't run Firefox. Despite that, over the past couple of days, I've run into the problem soon after my machine has finished its startup routine, which is not terribly encouraging if you consider that the only "cure" I've found to this problem is to reboot the machine. I do have better things to do.
Then something I caught "out of the corner of my screen" while browsing potential solutions turned out to be a huge help and points directly at Windows 7 as the culprit (as far as I can tell).
Programs can successfully be invoked from a command prompt. I therefore conclude that there is a serious problem with the mechanism by which the OS turns a double-click into a running application. (FWIW, hitting return after highlighting a file in a directory window doesn't work, either).
More research is required, but at least I have a workaround that won't force me to reboot if this phenomenon raises its ugly head at a particularly inconvenient time!
UPDATE (and data point): Thunderbird allows me to open email attachments by right-clicking them, and doing so on a Word file has just successfully opened an attached file in Word. Therefore, an application can open another application, too. Just can't double-click on it, is all...
