ToolTipFixer - Minor lockups?

[Morgan Mitchell]

Hello.

First of all let me thank you for a wonderful little program. It really does make life on an XP machine quite a lot more pleasant.

I have, however, noticed a bit of an odd behaviour when I leave the program (ToolTipFixer.exe) running in the background. When I'm playing a game, or watching video clips on youtube for example, there will be a quick "freeze" in the graphics/video once every ~2.5 seconds. It will run smoothly, then lock up for maybe a tenth of a second or two, then run smoothly again for about 2.5 seconds.

At first I thought maybe this was a graphics snag, so I put a different video card in, but the lockups remained. I then tried to reinstall the graphics drivers, to no avail. I also installed an older set of drivers; still no luck.

I tried to think of things that had changed in the last 24 hours, and only two new programs had been installed during that time frame; hkSFV (sfv checker) and ToolTipFixer.

I began with uninstalling ToolTipFixer, and sure enough, the lockups disappeared. I reinstalled it; and they came right back.

Now, I don't know if this is a problem on your end, it might as well be that some other program/driver on my machine has a problem with ToolTipFixer. But, I do know that ToolTipFixer is somehow involved.

I'm currently running it only when I need it (created a bat file to automatically start and stop the service), to avoid the twitchy graphics issue, but I would of course perfer to run it in the background 24/7.

Well, that's all I can think of. If you need any more feedback to get to the bottom of this, I'll be more than happy to do what I can to help.

Thanks for any and all help!


Morgan

[Makaveli213]

Which game are you playing that this occurs on. I have TTF running while i play my games and i have not noticed this behavior.

[Morgan Mitchell]

Originally Posted by Makaveli213

Which game are you playing that this occurs on. I have TTF running while i play my games and i have not noticed this behavior.

FlatOut 2 and Bejeweled 2 were the only ones I tried, and both of them had this laggy behaviour once every ~2.5 seconds.

Is the ToolTipFixer.exe process programmed to perform some task once every 2.5 seconds to prevent the tooltips to be hidden behind the task bar, or is this 2.5 second thing just a random thing happening on my system?

As I said, I created a bat file to run the TTF service manuelly, works like a charm, so it's not really a big deal for me. More than anything I'm just curious what's causing this.

[Computer Guru]

Well, it's definitely related to ToolTipFixer, because TTF does check the Z-Order indexes (the order of objects on-screen, i.e. what is on top of what) every 2.5 (or 3?) seconds.

But all it does is issue commands to Windows, and Windows does the actual checking (and re-ordering) of objects.

I'll look into it some, but I highly doubt there's anything I can do about it as its a OS-level issue, probably caused by a conflict with your configuration or something else on your machine.

Thanks for reporting it at any rate, and welcome to NST.

[Morgan Mitchell]

Originally Posted by Computer Guru

Well, it's definitely related to ToolTipFixer, because TTF does check the Z-Order indexes (the order of objects on-screen, i.e. what is on top of what) every 2.5 (or 3?) seconds.

Could very well be 3 seconds too, I never timed it, just did an unprecise head count.

Originally Posted by Computer Guru

I'll look into it some, but I highly doubt there's anything I can do about it as its a OS-level issue, probably caused by a conflict with your configuration or something else on your machine.

I figured as much, I made a friend install and run TTF the other day, and he did not have the issues I'm experiencing. I am quite sure it's a conflict of some sort on my machine. I'm running quite a few server and client applications on this box, any one of which could be causing these conflicts.

Originally Posted by Computer Guru

Thanks for reporting it at any rate, and welcome to NST.

Reporting bugs, and/or odd behaviour, is not always pleasurable, but it does help the community out even if it turns out to be a false positive (such as this one seems to be). I'm willing to bet that out of all the thousands of TTF users there is bound to be someone else with the same issue I'm experiencing.. and who knows, maybe he or she will read this thread one day.

And thanks for the welcome!

[Makaveli213]

Well i can say that i dont get this behaviour when i run games. I have run Star Wars KoToR, Doom 3, Counter Strike Source, and quite a few others and have not been able to reproduce this.

It could be something else you are running in the background that is affecting this as Mahmoud said. So basically it could be anything from your specs to your current applications running that could have a affect on this.

[DrawNewo]

I have noticed the same freezing behavior after installing the ToolTipFixer. For me the freezes are most noticeable when scrolling text or the browser window, or even moving the text cursor.

I found the freezes too annoying, so I disabled the NST ToolTipFixer service. As a work-around, I set up a scheduled task that calls a batch file that starts and stops the ttfixerservice every 5 minutes. Here's what the batch file looks like:

@echo off
cls
net start ttfixerservice
ping 127.0.0.1 > NUL
net stop ttfixerservice

(The ping is there to add a delay.)

BTW, this is running on a computer at work which has the McAfee VirusScan Enterprise Suite installed. I wonder if that is creating the conflict.

[Makaveli213]

Hello DrawNewo Welcome to NST!

Is the system you are running this on a XP based or Vista based system?

[DrawNewo]

It's an XP system. I have the program installed on another computer on our network, and it doesn't have the freezing problem. It appears to be machine dependent.

[Computer Guru]

To be perfectly honest with you, it is unlikely that this will get fixed. It has to do with Windows and the way it handles a z-layer re-indexing command rather than the code we use to issue that command.

However, you raise an interesting point.... ToolTipFixer can have an option added to run every x minutes instead of the default of 2 seconds - which is perfectly fine for people without the problem.

[DrawNewo]

Good News. I think I found a fix for the problem.

I checked for updates and found that 'Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1' was not installed. After installing it, the periodic freezing is no longer happening with the TTFixerService running. Maybe this was a bug with .NET Framework 2.0 that was fixed in the SP. This is worth trying for anyone having this problem.

[Makaveli213]

Thanks for the update DarwNewo. That is some good info thanks for the troubleshooting.

[Computer Guru]

Interesting - I'll contact some people experiencing the bug and see how this advice pans out.

Thanks for sharing your solution!