Loading strings problem

I recently installed StrokeIt, and have it loading at startup. Usually there is no problem, but three times now it has started with an empty error dialog. The title bar of the message shows the path to the strings file, but with an extra backslash, like this:
C:\Program Files\TCB Networks\StrokeIt\Strings\\English.lng

I can click OK to the empty message, but then when I open the StrokeIt configuration dialog, the menu text is replaced with squares, and the first item at the top of the applications tree is also a square. The second item in the tree is [Global Actions]. If I expand either of these I see the usual global actions. I deleted the one with the square.

If I shut down and re-start StrokeIt, everything is back to normal.

So my guess is that sometimes it fails to read the strings file for some reason, and that it's trying to show an error message about what went wrong, but it has no strings file to display the message!

Perhaps when this happens, StrokeIt should display a hard-coded message, and then close itself.

Whoops - should have read the bug guidelines post first.

StrokeIt version - .9.7
Operating System - Windows XP service pack 3
Crash reports - looked for CrashRpt but there was none

I really have don't know what is causing this. I have had weird errors on XP Pro 32-bits SP 3 too. They may not be related at all. Here are a few things that may or may not be relevant:

I once had weird problems with my actions being partly scrambled up, resulting in weird behaviour from time to time. I would then see weird symbols at certain places in my actions list, I think they were particularly prevalent among the On-Screen Display commands. Every time I reloaded my Actions/Gestures export file, things seemed to return to normal again; but if I then expanded or clicked on some actions or commands, the scrambling/symbols would immediately be visible again in some commands, and they wouldn't work, until I reloaded the file again etc. I think Hotkeys and OSDs were particularly susceptible to this: instead of "ALT + H", it would display weird symbols, and the same for the OSD text; and the selections like "top-centre-bottom" would just be empty.

I solved this by creating a new, action with OSD and hotkey commands. This new one would always work flawlessly. Then I exported all, went to the exported file, and examined the differences between the new action and the old ones, particularly one that I remembered got scrambled. There was something different about the number of quotation marks used, or perhaps the kind of quotation marks. In any case, I made sure all marks resembles those of the new gesture, by doing find-and-replace in Word and saving the whole as a .txt file (not a .doc file). When I imported this file, everything worked, though perhaps I went back a few times to clean it up some more. It is my guess that this was all due to some incompatibility between an old version of SI, in which I first made those gestures long ago, and a newer version that was not backwards compatible.

I had another problem when error messages popped up with OSD. I think this was partly due to the above scrambling: the system was trying to display scrambled symbols, which it couldn't. After I repaired all that, I got still got some error messages that were partly due to a GDI program I had installed, which is a kind of special Clear Type, softening the edges of letters. This too had something to do with the font used in OSD; I think I solved most of it by repairing the file as above, but also by changing the font in OSD.

I think I also ran into problems when I used gestures to copy and paste when in the StrokeIt menus: now I always copy and paste by actually right-clicking, clicking "copy", right-clicking elsewhere, clicking "paste", etc. Yuck, that is so annoying... how do people do that stuff without gestures? But not using gestures within SI did help.

Right now, I have had some weird errors too, and I think it might have been with some string thing too. On start-up, StrokeIt would crash with an error message, but be fine when I restarted it. No idea why it would be unable to find this strings/language file. At least it doesn't happen a lot.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/20/2011 10:45AM by Cerberus.

@Cerberus - thanks for your feedback. I tried to enter this in the bug tracker, but it doesn't seem to work for anonymous users. Could you enter a bug for me? Say something like "StrokeIt should use default messages when strings file could not be loaded - currently it displays 'missing' glyphs".

Done! I haven't seen Jeff (StrokeIt's maker) here for several months; let's hope he returns. I don't know whether you can see this: http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/bugs/view.php?id=20



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2011 08:49PM by Cerberus.

Thanks.