WildBill

One bugfix at a time, I'm getting there. Firefox 3.5 was doing some screwy things with window origins and coordinate transformations. I don't yet understand it, but not trying to clip at the window origin fixed the problem with text disappearing. Now I want to do some more testing and maybe add support for skinning trackbars.

bob2000: Here is the link to IconViewer 1.4: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?kyozmuyimom

Sure, it's on my other box. I'll post it tomorrow. As an update. I FINALLY found that Explorer bug that was driving me insane. There's a GDI leak in the toolbar painting code that was causing Explorer (and eventually any other apps with toolbars) to run out of available GDI handles. I was seeing that when Explorer started experiencing problems, they remained even if I stopped SmoothText and restarted it. I eventually saw that calls to CreateDIBSection were returning ERROR_NOT_ENOUGH_MEMORY when I restarted SmoothText. I bought a program that shows me the GDI handle usage of any running process and that did the trick. Juat for good measure, I put in a check so that the image-loading routine wouldn't try to copy data to a failed DIB section since the pointer would be null. I also was surprised to find that the Targa image-loading code wasn't thread-safe, so I fixed that as well. The next step is to see if the Firefox 3.5 bug is still around. I'll have to test that on my main box. I've made a ton of fixes since I last tested it on Firefox 3.5, so I'm hoping that it's gone.

I have XPize 4.3 installed, and I had used my IconViewer program to remove the alpha components from the icons. If you do a search, you should be able to find IconViewer somewhere on the forum (if you can't, let me know and I can dig it up and put it on MediaFire). It's not slipstreamed in, it's installed normally, and the trick is to run IconViewer after the fact then force XPize to reload a couple of times to get the changes to work. It's a little tricky, which is why I haven't done it lately.

It's a direct screen capture, but a couple of years ago I ran XPize on this laptop, which Reshacked a lot of images.

I only had buttons, toolbars, and explorer tabs turned on since I'm still trying to hunt down Explorer instability issues, but this is what I got. I didn't make any changes, I simply put the .INI in the skins folder, and put your images in a "Skins\test" folder. I'm using SmoothText 1.0.0, but for this there is no difference from 0.9.9. This is a Win2k laptop, but it had XPize run on it in the past, which is why the taskbar graphic is different.

Hmm. I might need them. The .INI looks fine to me, I guess I'll have to test the skin to figure out what's wrong.

Sure, they've worked for me for some time. Would you mind posting your .INI file?

[COMPONENT_PUSHBUTTON_HOT] Type=Image Component=PushButton Image=PushButton State=Hot StartingFrame=3 EndingFrame=3 TextColor=DarkBlue ShadowColor=Etch ShadowType=Simple The State=Hot is what tells SmoothText to use this image only on mouseover.

Yes, the skinning engine supports it. You can even take it to an extreme and have different mouseover images when it's enabled, disabled, default, etc. The legal values for the State= setting are normal, pressed, focused, disabled, default, hot, checked, and indeterminate. Not all of them apply to every control, but the trick is that you can combine them any way you wish. For instance, if you wanted to have a mouseover image that ONLY applied to checkboxes that were checked AND disabled, you would specify State=checked,disabled,hot in the .INI file (the order doesn't matter).

This standalone config program is turning out to be really helpful. It looks like my toolbar code might be causing a lot of the Explorer instability, and I'll try to verify that tonight. I've also added support for skinning up-down controls, and you can have them highlight on mouseover if skinning is off. I also want to add support for skinning trackbar controls soon, and I've fixed several other bugs. While I'm chasing down this Explorer problem, though, would anyone mind donating a skin that I could include with it? It would be nice if it came with just one basic skin.

http://www.autourdupc.com/ I think most of their fixes might be out of date now, but I'm not completely certain. It's not the Spanish I had in school, and that was over 20 years ago at any rate... I think I might have picked up a few words, though, just from having been to this site so many times over the years.

Well, I've built a standalone configuration program based on the built-in one (almost all of the code is shared), and I'm testing what I hope will fix most of the Explorer problems. From turning things off one at a time I think the problem was in the taskbar's tab control trying to get the Window caption from other tasks. I really can't believe how fragile Explorer is. You'd think Microsoft would have made it a lot more bulletproof.

Just a little update...my main development desktop is down until I get my monitor back from service. In the meantime, I'm working on SmoothText 1.0.0 on my laptop. I don't have the Firefox 3.5 bug fixed as I'm not running it on my laptop (and I don't want to switch just yet on it), but I have checkboxes in for turning on and off overriding some of the Windows controls (e.g. buttons, static controls, list boxes, etc.) This will give you more control over how SmoothText overrides things and might help narrow down Explorer problems. I've also changed the order of initializing the skinning engine vs. initializing the overriding controls behavior, and this seems to help with Explorer a little. Finally, I've started adding support in the skinning engine for changing the system colors. Each skin can specify which system colors to change, and SmoothText will change them when it starts skinning. It will, of course, change back to your original colors when it exits. I also fixed a bug in taskbar skinning where the taskbar background wasn't being painted properly. Here is a small screenshot with SmoothText managing my system colors:

I've got a 1Tb drive working on my Win2k box, formatted NTFS. I had to have EnableBigLBA turned on, but otherwise I've had no issues.

Blackwingcat, I just wanted to say, thanks for making that ATI 48xx driver. I recently bought an Asus EAH4890 TOP card and your driver is working great on my Win2k box.

Yesterday I put in an Asus pcie card based on the ATI 4890. Using blackwingcat's hacked win2k driver it's running like a champ. I played Overlord II with everything on at 2560x1600 and everything is lightning quick.

I'm also seeing text dropouts in Firefox 3.5, which I'll have to work on before release. I've also fixed the placement of symbols in the minimize, maximize, close, and help buttons in my development version.

Just a little update...InstallShield Express comes with Delphi 6 Pro and I finally decided to give it a try. It's pretty neat, and for version 1.0.0 there will be a single Setup.exe rather than a ZIP file.

I haven't added support yet for resizing the taskbar to match the skin height. That will be one of the later things I put in, after these nagging bugs get fixed and I add support for skinning more components.

That's right, skinning won't work unless you first turn on overriding standard controls.

I think that Override Standard Controls is still buggy (specifically, there is probably a bug in the code for one of the control types). The problem is figuring out where the problem is: for version 1.0.0 I think I'm going to have to let you turn on or off overriding of individual controls. Hopefully that will let you narrow down the problem. The SmoothText program itself doesn't consume all that much in the way of resources, but I'm thinking of going along with Tripo's suggestion of a program that can configure it without actually starting it. That should help you in cases where it's causing lockups and you're trying to narrow it down. Give me a few days to get it all put together...

To use a color-keyed image, you have to do something like this: [color7] ID=Pink <-- Note the name of the color (you can call it anything you want!) R=255 G=0 B=255 [iMAGE0] ID=PushButton FileName=buttons.bmp FrameOrder=HorzFirst FrameCountingHorz=Increments FrameCountingVert=Increments FramesHorz=5 FramesVert=1 StretchRectTop=6 StretchRectBottom=6 StretchRectLeft=6 StretchRectRight=6 Transparency=ColorKey <-- This tells SmoothText that the image uses a color to designate transparency ColorKey=Pink <-- This is the name of the color you use, it has to be whatever you used in the color's ID field

I decided to give this a try again, and I got Windows Media Player 10 running on my Windows 2000 box. Thanks for all your effort! Might I make a suggestion for KDW? I noticed that a lot of the buttons haven't been translated into English. I've received permission to use and distribute a set of free images for buttons, toolbars, and such (from someone who works on another project who would like to remain anonymous ) Anyhow, would you mind maybe trying some of them on certain buttons? That way, even if the text isn't translated, the image could at least tell us something about what it does (e.g. magnifying glass for "Browse..." buttons). Here's a link to the image files. They're quite good. http://www.savefile.com/files/2136855

Is there an English version? I can't read Japanese... Edit: Ah, I found the Google translate link at the bottom. That helps a lot. I was once tempted to learn French so I could read a site that has a lot of Windows 2000 fixes, but Japanese might be a bridge too far