I have been experiencing very frequent (10x per day) hangs of NextStart. Every one seems to occur when I have a floating task bar item with 2 or more instances of a program, with two or more miniviews up. If I do not move off one of the views quickly, the NextStart tries to highlight the window in question. If I then move the mouse, NextStart is usually hung.

The apps I am running are mostly communications software that I am writing and debugging, with a half-dozen tools also open.

NextSTART has the Peek windows feature, in which mousing over an highlighted window thumbnail, after a short pause, brings the associated window to the foreground, hiding all other windows.

To prevent an abrupt 'jump', this is done by fading out visible windows and fading in the target window.

There is a potential problem with this, though: if one of the windows is 'hang' (i.e. not responding) but not yet marked by the OS as such, NextSTART can hang as well until that window starts responding again.

Perhaps I can solve this by not relying in the OS so much and instead use SendMessageTimeout to see if a window is responding.

For now, give this theory a test by disabling the 'Window Peeking' feature (Tasklist and Systray Preferences tab).

Good theory...test appears to be a success. No more hangs.

It is very likely that some of the programs NextStart was trying to "peek" were hung. I write very intricate multi-threaded communications applications and during debugging, they will hang. Since I have loads of programs open at any one time, I often go to the task bar to bring an open app out of minimized mode. If I accidentally cross the icon for the hung app.....

I would highly recommend an alternative way of doing your peek and letting your app hang. If hung apps are a problem, perhaps you should launch another thread to do whatever work you need to do to determine another app's state. If that thread hangs, your main app can time out and kill the "peek" thread, optionally report the error, and continue operating.

And I would... if VB allowed multi-threaded applications. Alas, it does not.