Problem -- WinVNC, 16 bit apps, updates & lockup.

[Bruce Tulloch]

Thanks James,

I've investigated a little further...

I can see a similar problem with Microsoft Office 97 running under Window 95 via
WinVNC 3.2.2 R2.

There seems to be something a little bit feral about the way these programs update
parts of their screen as far as WinVNC is concerned. For example, Word in Office 97
works fine until the mouse cursor moves across Word's ruler when suddenly updates
become very sluggish.

It's as if something happens to cause the Win95 machine to become CPU bound,
starving the WinVNC service of processing time, or perhaps WinVNC itself gets caught
up in some tight loops or race condition. Moving the mouse away from the ruler fixes
the problem after WinVNC gets a chance to process the backlog of queued events that
were delayed when the mouse was over the ruler.

I don't have an NT machine to try this out at present so I can't tell you whether
this is specific to '95 or not.

Any clues ?

Many thanks, Bruce.

PS: I've given up on 16 bit applications under Win95, so don't worry about them on
my account.

James [Wez] Weatherall wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Bruce wrote:
>
> > Further, (and this is probably the key to the problem) I could find no entry
> > created for this application in the Application_prefs key in the registry. All
> > the other (32 bit) applications I've been running appear to have been caught by
> > WinVNC and defaults initialized here, but this application appears to go
> > unoticed by WinVNC.
>
> I'm not sure.  It's possible that Windows has some limitations on hooking
> of Win16 apps with Win32 code, so that may be the cause, in which case I
> doubt there is an easy fix.  Some applications are just plain awkward in
> the way they access the display, so WinVNC can't hook them.  It's strange
> that the machine hangs every so often - such hangs would tend to point
> more to a problem with the 16-bit app than with VNC, because 16-bit apps
> are scheduled in a co-operative way on Win95, rather than pre-emptively.
> Is it possible for you to try the problem app out on a Windows NT machine,
> to see if it hangs on that system, too.  I suspect it wouldn't (or at
> least it wouldn't hang the whole machine.)
>
> Hope that helps,
>
> James "Wez" Weatherall
> --
> Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory, Cambridge, UK.
> Tel : Work - 343000




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