SmoothText 1.1.8

[WildBill]

Well, at least that's some good news

That's a real surprise that there was an exception on a BehaviorWndProcBefore message. That's definitely not what I expected. I'm putting in more logging so the message details will be logged, as well as the class name of the window that processed it. I'll see what I can reproduce here, but if I can't find out any more I'll see what else I can do and release the next version tomorrow.

[WildBill]

I've posted version 0.8.3, which will log more information if it catches an exception (which so far I haven't been able to reproduce). It also does a better job of smoothing text on title bars (there were some windows that it wasn't catching).

[CaptainStacks]

Keep up the excellent work WildBill, I can hardly stand to use Windows 2000 without SmoothText anymore.

I love how well it works, and I'm recommending it to all my friends who are still sticking with Windows 2000.

Thank you, and keep up the good work!

[WildBill]

Thanks for the compliments! If anyone can offer feedback I'd really appreciate it as it helps me make the program even better.

I've posted version 0.8.4, which has a couple of fixes and improvements.

[Colonel O'Neill]

So far, no Explorer related crashing yet. Most notably, restarting Explorer in any fashion starts a string of exceptions. When SmoothText starts with Windows at boot, nothing goes wrong until some errant program (occasionally, but not always SmoothText) kills Explorer. Then subsequent starts of Explorer are plagued with exception errors until a restart.

But so far, no crashing with 0.8.4!

Also I noticed MsgBox dialog boxes were being smoothed, but the message abruptly ends after around 255 characters. (ImageShack isn't cooperating today so I'll just upload it here.)

Felt particularly mac-cy today.

Edited March 23, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[WildBill]

LOL, I thought that 255 would be enough

That was easily fixed, and I've posted 0.8.5 which will first find out the caption length and get the whole string.

I'm glad to hear that you're not seeing crashes, though I'd be interested to see your exception log. Ideally, there should be no exceptions so I would like to try to prevent them.

[Colonel O'Neill]

About 20 seconds after starting 0.8.5, I got this explorer exception:

[  93.645] [872, 1140] - Caught exception when named object StandardBehavior tried to process message BehaviorWndProcRet

But this always happens when changing SmoothText versions without restarting. I'll shut down today and add results tomorrow.

P.S. "255 characters should be more than plenty. So was 640K."

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EDIT: No problems after restart. Rebuilding icon cache using TweakUI is problem-free.

EDIT2: At least until my Explorer died after trying out the Entbloess for Win2000 program. I think my Windows Explorer is failing. The first instance is perfect until it crashes for some reason, then theres no end of the exceptions until a restart.

Edited March 23, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[Colonel O'Neill]

Heres another exception log: TextHookLog-956.txt

[3481.636] [956, 1252] - Caught exception when named object StandardBehavior tried to process message BehaviorWndProcBefore
[3481.666] [956, 1252] - Message = $0407, Window = tooltips_class32, WParam = $00000000, LParam = $0006FC8C
[3481.676] [956, 1252] - Window parent chain:
[3481.676] [956, 1252] - tooltips_class32 -- 131196

I don't think explorer crashing is SmoothText, it's probably just my explorer.

Update: Huge other log:

Edited March 24, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[WildBill]

The first tooltip one is really bizarre. It's throwing an exception on a WM_USER + 7, and the tooltip isn't even subclassed; I would expect Windows to just throw the message away.

The log looks like the tab painting routine is wigging out. I'll work on that one tomorrow, but in the meantime I've posted version 0.8.6. It has a small change to the button-handling code that is the first step in preparing for a skinning engine (I separated the actual painting code from the code that sets it up). I also improved the logging so that the log will show a string indicating how far it got before the exception was thrown. It doesn't have too much granularity yet, so for instance in the tab painting errors all it would show is that it's handling tab messages. I put all this in before I saw your second log.

More to come tomorrow, probably, but why don't you give this a try.

[WildBill]

Aha! I had accidentally broken the code that retrieved the tab text. I found that I was seeing the same exceptions you were whenever I had the control panel open. I managed to fix it, and the exceptions are gone. Version 0.8.7 is now up, and I think that will solve the exception/crashing problems.

[Colonel O'Neill]

No exceptions so far!

Can't wait to see some awesome skinning in 2000!

I wonder if you could just port UberSkin's engine to 2000 + AlphaPNG's of course ;D

Oops: A few exceptions in a row produced this:

TextHookLog-832.txt

[  49.391] [832, 512] - Caught exception when named object DrawRedirectBehavior tried to process message DrawRedirectBeginPaint, completion status = ""

Plus a longer log TextHookLog-1324.txt

Also, are the numbers appended to the end Process ID's?

P.S. I know I've edited this a bunch of times but whatever.

SmoothText is causing some funny behavior in Firefox 3.1 b3... Just to let you know.

Edited March 25, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[WildBill]

The number in the filename is the process ID. If you look at the bracketed numbers in the log, the first number is the process ID and the second number is the thread ID. Breaking it up this way makes the logs a lot easier to follow to try to find root causes.

I take it that the translucent taskbar is working for you now? The strange thing about the log you attached is that the completion status shouldn't be empty. I don't know why that is so.

I've started laying out the classes for a skinning engine, but I want to write one from scratch, one that's hopefully very flexible. As far as using existing skins, I'm thinking that standalone import program(s) are the way to go.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Ahh now it makes more sense. Wouldn't it be better to include the process name, because it might be relevant to the crashing program itself...

Anyhow, I forgot to try translucent taskbar... EDIT: Translucent taskbar causes full system freeze.

Today, explorer lasted two and a half hours before crashing, then explorer crashes continuously.

And if you need some skinners, I'd be glad to help, although free time is a valuable commodity for me now.

EDIT: I'm pretty sure at this point any exceptions aren't being caused by SmoothText; explorer crashes often even without SmoothText.

Edited March 27, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[WildBill]

I've posted version 0.8.8, which on my PC seems much more stable. I've made a lot of internal changes, and hopefully this will work a lot better. Please let me know what you think.

It would be nice if SmoothText came with at least one skin, but I'm not ready for that yet. First I need to make it stable and then I'll start on a skinning engine.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Definitely more stable! But I tried the TweakUI repair icon thing twice (with and without Override) and came up with three logs:

[ 48.119] [1264, 1940] - Caught exception in PostObjectMessage: assembling named object list, Message = BehaviorMsg

[1390.179] [1032, 1148] - Could not send message DrawRedirectInvalidateRect to named object Behavior,DrawRedirectBehavior

[ 795.104] [1028, 1248] - Could not send message DrawRedirectGetDC to named object Behavior,DrawRedirectBehavior

Also, shortcut menu's are broken: Screenshot

EDIT: Transparent taskbar worked in Safe Mode, but locked up as soon as I opened a folder.

Edited March 28, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill