Difficulty creating desktop objects when lSwitcher is running

[Lewis Rosenthal]

This may or may not be an lSwitcher issue, but as I have observed the problem consistently when lSwitcher has been running, and then repeating my steps after closing lSwitcher following yet another reboot, and having those objects create normally, this should probably be documented.

I am using the "fixed" 2.81 exe. Kernel is 14.106_W4, on eCS 2.1, ThinkPad T43, SNAP, ATI X300, 2.26GHz Pentium M Dothan. Desktop is on the boot volume (C:), which is JFS.

1. I downloaded the OpenOffice 4.1.1 RC3 non-debug version and unzipped to j:\PROGRAMS\OpenOffice 4.
2. I created a new folder for OO4, and copied the folder icon from OO3.2.
3. I first tried copying all of the objects from the OO3.2 folder to the new OO4 folder, and then edited the paths one by one to reflect the new locations (I did not uninstall OO3.2, so all of those objects remain valid).
4. The exe's have the ugly icons in them, so I then selected all of the new objects, went to Properties from the context menu, which opened them all, and then painstakingly dragged the OO3.2 icons for each to the new objects for OO4. I then had to edit the names of a couple of them.
5. I closed the desktop folders and rebooted, saving the ini files using XWP 1.0.9's INI routines as set from the Desktop xShutdown page.
6. Upon restarting and opening the folder, all of my new icons were gone.

I repeated the above several times, in several different ways (open the drives object, browse to the program directory, open it, select all of the exe's, right-click, select Create Program Object, etc.), and still I had inconsistent results. Sometimes, only a few of the objects would be missing, and not all of them. Usually the URL object for the readme was okay.

DMT (which I have installed under eCS 2.1, on this machine) even created a folder of lost objects, and three of the objects were recovered, sans their new icons and corrected titles (i.e., with ugly program icons and exe names).

In between, I even deleted and recreated the folder, and created it on the desktop instead of under Programs, all with similar results.

Finally, I booted the machine, closed lSwitcher upon desktop init, and created the folder contents again (all items were missing except Text Document, Open document..., Math, and the README URL). I shut down and rebooted, and the older contents came up intact. UniMaint shows no errors, and neither does checkini (which both came up with errors during my previous attempts).

[Gregg Young]

What happens if you just restart the desktop instead of rebooting?

i just experienced an issue that might be related. I added the ability to create a JAVA object to FM/2. The problem I encountered was the loss of the icon if the object was opened in settings view before WPS was restarted.I tried this with lSwitcher closed and while it didn't fix the icon loss the result was lSwitcher failed to open when I restarted Xcenter,

2015-05-24 09:23:30:98 T032 plgLoadClasses (E:\NOSA_WORK_COPY\XWORKPLACE\src\shared\plugins.c, line 514):

InitModule call (export @1) failed for plugin DLL

"W:\ECS\SYSTEM\EWPS\plugins\xcenter\lswidget.dll".

DLL returned error msg:

DosAllocSharedMem error

Once this error has occurred if I move the broken object to the trashcan and empty the trashcan WPS hangs and I am forced to reboot. If however I just restart the desktop xcenter reopens with lSwitcher and I can delete the broken object. If I restart WPS after creating the object everything works fine.

[Lewis Rosenthal]

I have not seen this for a long, long time, and in the intervening time, I have done much to clean cruft from my extra-fat, really, really, long-in-the-tooth INI files.

If this did have anything to do with lSwitcher, I would guess it was only because lSwitcher was the "one thing too many" which allowed my INIs to corrupt when trying to add "the next thing too many" to them.

I consider this invalid, as there is nothing which can be done in lSwitcher itself to correct this. In short, this ticket is so old, and so much has changed with this system since then, that I cannot reproduce it.

[Lewis Rosenthal]

Milestone renamed