ToolTipFixer Broken by XP Service Pack 3

Zer0 Voltage · #1 May 8th, 2008, 12:20 AM

I installed service pack 3 for Windows XP today and the NST ToolTipFixer 1.0.1 service (ToolTipFixer.exe) was immediately broken.

The Event Viewer shows two entries for the failure - both with the Service Control Manager as the source. The first event description says:

"Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for the NST ToolTipFixer service to connect."

Immediately followed by a separate event saying:

"The NST ToolTipFixer service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion."

When I tried to start it manually, it seemed to work but eventually the following event got logged:

"The NST ToolTipFixer service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s)."

This is absolutely due to SP3. The service was working fine, I installed SP3 and rebooted, and this now happens every time.

Can anyone else confirm this?

Computer Guru · #2 May 11th, 2008, 08:33 PM

Hi Zer0 Voltage, welcome to NeoSmart Technologies.

I haven't had a chance to test ToolTipFixer under Windows XP SP3 - it's odd that it would break it since it's mostly a roll-up pack w/ a couple of backported features from Windows Vista..... I'll have to give it a test and see how it goes.

Thanks for the heads-up, I'll let you know what I find out.

Zer0 Voltage · #3 May 12th, 2008, 05:23 AM

Actually, now it just seems to be XP SP3 on my laptop only. On my desktop, the problem hasn't happened since upgrading. Not sure what makes my laptop config unique. I fully uninstalled and reinstalled the ToolTipFixer, but the problem remained.

However, it looks like this may not really be an issue now since apparently the tooltip bug may no longer exist after SP3.

On a SP2 system, I can reproduce the tooltip focus problem easily - for example, just by going into Start, then All Programs, then sorting by name. But on SP3, I cannot make it happen anymore.

I went through the release notes for SP3 and didn't see anything obvious that might be related to fixing this problem, but it sure does seem to be fixed anyway. I guess only time will confirm this though.

Thanks for responding!