HouseBot

Has anyone had any problems running the X86 SW remote client on a Windows PC running Win MCE or a dual core Pentium 4?

I just got a new PC that has a dual core P4 (Presler 940) and it came with Win MCE preinstalled. I copied my SW remote X86 .exe file and ran it. It doesn't work right! It connects to my HB server, no problem, loads the theme, no problem. But all the property values are not displaying correctly. some of them appear, some of them disappear. When I switch to another page, the values will appear and THEN almost immediately disappear as if they were being overwritten with a blank value.

I am still running Meedio's HB 2.22. I tried both SW X86 clients from 2.22 and 2.32 in hopes that it would work, but no luck. I don't want to have to upgrade the HB server to 2.32 yet - I still think there is a problem with the SW remote or something....

What's going on here? Suggestions?


Thanks.

Yes, I have had this problem with my newest windows machine. It has an ATI card while my other machines have had NVIDIA cards. I'm not sure if this is the problem though.

Some people report you need the latest video drivers and the latest DirectX, which I think is 9.0c. I upgraded these but it didn't help.

I ended up changing my text properties to stop using transparent backgrounds and set the background to match the panel color behind the text. This worked for my fairly simple theme but isn’t a great solution for fancy background panels.

I have reported this bug in the past but I'm not sure if it's a HouseBot bug, and ATI bug or something else. I have seen some difficulty with display of a couple other programs on this computer.

If you find a different way to work around this problem I would be interested in hearing it.

Mark

Why not upgrade to 2.32? I guess if you want to rule out some stuff, being up2date is the first to do. I know there have been some changes concerning SWRemotes. I would really start by upgrading your software!

I have the same problem with one of my three touchscreen systems and upgrading to 2.32 didn't help. I only have this problem on one system and my guess was that it's a video driver or system resource issue. In my case this is a fairly old PC but since this other system is fairly high end it must be something else.

-- Dave

do you use transparent background for the property values?

I reported a problem of property values with transparent background in the past.

http://www.housebot.com/phpbb2/viewtopi ... ransparent

Yes, I am using transparent backgrounds on the property that show this problem. I saw your post but I had forgotten about it. The odd part is that I have "room-based" themes that only differ in terms of things like volume control and source selection, but I've only seen this problem on one of my software remotes. All of the rest of them work fine.

-- Dave

Hi -

Thanks to all those who replied! It seems that we've discovered a new bug in Housebot. I haven't written back mainly because I had a new video card on order. Now that it's arrived and is in my new PC, I can say that the video card is NOT the problem. I went from the stock ATI card to an nVidia 6600 with the latest driver. I still get blanking on my property values!

What I can tell you is on all my other PC's, I have NOT had this problem and they all are Windows XP Pro except for one, which is Windows XP home. The new PC I have is the first one I've gotten with Win MCE. I am wondering if its either the dual core processor causing the problem or it's something in MCE that interferes with HB.

Like I said, my SW remote screens will display their values if I flash between two screens back and forth and I can see the values show up briefly (properly formatted) BEFORE they're blanked out, as if they were replaced by a null value.

I did try upgrading the SW remote that was included with HB 2.32 but it made no difference. However, I did NOT upgrade the HB server to 2.32 (still 2.22). I don't feel that an upgrade there is waranted yet until someone can tell me that IS the problem, but somehow I don't think it is.

Like others, I do have transparent text backgrounds. Why should I change that now? It's worked perfectly fine all my other machines, including my Axim PDA. There is something wrong here! We just don't know what it is.

I'll file a bug report if it hasn't been done already....

Hey!

I just discovered something that may shed light on this issue.

When I switch to a new page on the SW remote, the values will eventually blank out. However, if I move another application's window over the SW remote display, and move it out of the way again (releasing it is not necessary) , the values on the SW remote page appear again! Only the part where the other application's window obscured the SW remote display.

Naturally, if I want to see all the values in the SW remote page, I have to obscure the whole SW remote display and then unobscure it.

Weird. Never saw this behavior before - what now?

P.S. I am running DX 9.0c

I experienced the same problem when I created the Software Remote and Theme for the News Script Device.

The main panel displays several RSS-based news stories stored as HouseBot properties. Clicking the Refresh button (retrieves RSS feed) would cause the underlying properties to randomly disappear/reappear. Confirmed it was not a coding error because all of the properties are correctly retrieved when Refresh is clicked; it's a display problem.

Using evaluation version of HouseBot 2.32 on Windows XP Home SP2.

I guess this thread ought to be in the Bug report section.

Just to add an other data point to this discussion the system I have that displays this problem is running Windows XP Home MCE. All my other systems are not running MCE and work fine displaying property values with transparent background.

Mark

Kilowatt -

Is your CPU running the MCE system (with the SW remote not working properly) a dual core? Are any other of your systems that your SW remote works correctly running dual processors?

my system with the problem has a single core with hyper threading so it acts like two cores sort of. My other systems are older and only single core.

Check out this post.

I'd like to add here that the fix that Scottbox provided appears to fix my problem for my dual core set up.

It fixed mine also