Hi,
I've come back to the Winstep fold after a couple of years trying to make Windows do what I wanted. Bzzzt.

I've installed Winstep Xtreme on my XP x64 box (details below), and everything seems to work fine (Nexus, Workshelf, etc), but NextStart has terrible problems crashing out every time I try to do anything in it. The problem is, it crashes at different times doing different things.

It also seems to have extreme problems with the system tray management, even turned off, it breaks, and then Windows breaks too.

If I logout and back in again, Nextstart runs OK. All the task buttons, etc, are in place. If I then click the Start button, I usually get the Nextstart menu, and from there on, anything can happen. I may be able to view the Programs menu, or I may be able to start the NS Preferences, or it may crash as soon as I move the mouse over any menu item. Completely random.

The system is Windows XP Professional x64 edition. Build 3790, SP2, plus ALL hotfixes. THis is a quad AMD core system with 4G ECC RAM, booting off an IDE 500G drive (C: drive). Drive D: is a 1.2Tb RAID 5 volume (64-bit 3WARE 9550X 8-channel hardware RAID with one hot spare, one hot swap, and battery-backed write cache). The root of the D: drive is mapped to My Documents. A second, 2Tb data drive is mapped as E:, but I don't think it plays any part in the problem. I use an 80G SATAII drive as the dedicated swapfile volume (only 10G swapfile size, but I don't miss the other 70G). The Temp drive is another 80G SATAII drive (on a separate SATA controller). Write caching is disabled for every drive.

Display is Tul Radeon X1600 PCIE-x8, with the latest 64-bit drivers (8.421.0.0). Displays are Viewsonic 1600x1200 as the secondary display, and a HP L1925 (1280x1k) as the primary.

The only really unusual thing about this system is that I use multiple high-res sound cards, which can cause some applications problems when they try to access the sound device without going through the WIndows enumerator, but I've disabled sound in NextStart altogether, and it made no difference.

The error message displayed (IF it's displayed) is unhelpful in the extreme. Usually, it's just "Winstep has encountered an exception.", but half the time, NS just disappears without trace, leaving the system tray unusable. The windows start bar/task bar works fine afterwards (usually), and I can continue to use WorkShelf and all the gadgets just fine.

The application error logs for the last 3 crashes are:


If anyone can offer some suggestions to help make NS more stable, that would be much appreciated.

Please note, this is an always on business system with significant workloads normally, and I can't just "reboot" whenever I feel like it. So getting NS stable would be really great, but if it's not possible, I can disable NS for the time being, and run it in a VMWare x64 session to help troubleshoot/faultfind.

My apologies for the length of this post. If it should be in a more appropriate forum, please move it!

PC Pete
-EDIT-
I've done some more testing, and the problems occur regardless of the theme or placement of the NS start button, on either display.

But I did miss one small peculiarity - the "standard" (default) WX install (i.e. no mods or changes by me) had at least 2 NS hotspots. One (the one I was expecting) is at the far left bottom of the leftmost (primary) display. But I've also found the same hotspot duplicated at the top left of the secondary display.
I'm not sure if that's designed in, but I can't see any reference to the second hotspot anywhere in the NS config tool (hotspots editor has only one hotspot at the correct location).

I'm also not sure if this is a feature (in case one display is accidentally disabled) or a bug, nor if it's related to the NS instability. But NS still crashes if I access it through the upper hotspot.
-/EDIT-

Hard to say what the problem might be since random errors are terribly difficult to diagnose! The error logs seem to indicate that it is some kind of automation (COM) error. Why this happens with NextSTART only and not WorkShelf as well is really weird, since both applications share the menu code. Maybe it's something actually NOT related to the menus, and it just appears that way? Have you tried running NextSTART with Task Management disabled?

It would also be nice if you could discuss this with Tbeller, who is also running a 64 bit version of Windows as I mentioned in the other thread.

Jorge, I've disabled task management, but that didn't fix the problem.

I suspect that it might be a latency or buffer overflow type of problem. If I try to not allow the mouse to run up and down the default NS start menu, but instead raise the menu and then carefully select submenus or menu options, NS "lasts" a lot longer before it dies.

On the other hand, if I open the default NS start menu, and run the mouse up and down the list quickly, NS dies almost immediately, every time.

I'm going to try and disable some of the "folder menu" items and see what that does (I seem to always trigger the failure when NS tries to open the "My *" folders (My Documents, My Computer, etc).

I've also noted that when NS shows the Control Panel menu, it only shows x86 cpanel applets, not any of the "new" x64 applets. I don't know if that's related, but I'll try and investigate a bit more.

Meanwhile, if you have any other suggestions or ideas, please let me know!
[EDIT]
Oh, and the NS task is always left running when NS "dies". Typically, if NS dies when I'm navigating an NS menu, the menu remains on the screen, but all the rest of the NS stuff - taskbar, systray, etc - disappears.

I'm also unable to "disable" the task bar display - if I turn off "Show Running Tasks", the tasks are detached from NS, but they're always visible at the same place they appeared in the NS taskbar - this happens with all themes that use a task bar skin, and if the theme just uses buttons, I can't disable them either. I'm not sure if this is related to the issues above, or I'm just misreading the description of disabling the task list.
[/EDIT]
[EDIT2]
Oops, I spoke too soon. NS is still hung, and I've now lost the Windows start menu altogether. I can't kill the NS task, and I can't raise the start menu, not even with Ctrl-Esc!
I'll be back after a logoff/logon...
[/EDIT2]

Ok, i'm running Vist 64bit with nextstart only (till now) because i'm troubleshooting since weeks the performance problems of Vista hehe.....

Nexstart itself ist extremly stable, however, i'm using it as a popping up under the mouse menu-system and i can't live without it. (No Taskbar and no Systray)

So what is my exp with Vista 64 on a 8 gig Asus Workstation-Board?

It is fast..... very fast!

The graphic you see when vista is booting takes 7 rounds, than a blank screen, followed by the vistalogo and the login screen.
After immediately typing in the password it takes 2 seconds and bang: Vista is ready to work with all apps started!

So every one who says Vista is not fast.... has a driver issue. An Example is the Firewire driver from Microsoft which is slowing down the system.... just disable it and you see a performance boost.

The 32bit Engine seems extremely stable... i haven't seen a program which is not running.

The only issues i have with winstep are hard coded links in the file system which are shown up in winstep but gives errors by selecting them... so you have to click on the linked dir directly.

tbeller, as an ex-MSCE, I have a pretty good idea what's under the hood of Vista.

You're right - drivers are critical for an "acceptable user experience" of Vista. And one of the biggest changes was the startup sequencing. That's what windows user everywhere have begged for (at least, after WFW 3.11! ) And the interface - well, let's just say that the first time I laid eyes on a early beta, I immediately thought "Win 2000 with NextStart and WindowBlinds"!

But unfortunately, the rest of the OS is a bit of a nightmare. Every layer has a security blanket, and not all the security works right, and not all of it is linked correctly, so applying some driver changes in one part of Vista doesn't affect the same driver in another part! And don't get me started on WIFI support (you need to access three separate applets to configure a new wireless network, and the error logging is almost non-existent), or encrypted video and audio codecs.

MS went for a "user experience" model, and they've done a fantastic job on the UI generally, but underneath, I can assure you, it's truly a can of worms.

I couldn't get the early betas to run stably on my AMD quadcore board (nor on my quadcore Xeon board), that's why I went with XP x64 instead.

But I'm starting to regret it now... Support? What's that? If you look up "XP x64 support" in a dictionary, you see a link to the "null" reference...

Hi Pete,

i'm using multiple processors since they where available with NT. Do you remember the comments of all users worldwide?
Who needs multiple processors?
There are no applications for them... etc.

But NT itself has supportet multiple processors and the system itself was "faster" with them.

I think we have with Vista the same problem.

Who needs Vista? Problem with games, slower then XP etc.

And right! Ii have also used Windows 2003 64 bit... it felt faster but there where two problems: 1. It was a server system and many hardware vendors are not supporting them (try to find a keyboard with drivers for win2003.....)
2. 64 Bit... try to find drivers for 64 bit...

From my opinion with Vista Microsoft has done a marketing trick:

Vista 32 bit is supporting only 3 Gigabyte of ram out of 4 installed and i think the world is changing: Who want only use 3gb?

So the most people are changing (if they are changing) to 64 bit and yes: Drivers are available... so i think in one year there should be no problem at all.

Regarding all the security stuff: I just put it off, because it makes no sence for me.

And yes, there are many problems may be like wifi (I'm not using) however, Vista is coming.

I personally found it very interesting that there are many users out there which are playing with vista and in forums there is much support for it.

However, i try to verify the problems which you have with Winstep if they also exist in Vista.