HouseBot

Hi,

I posted this in another thread in another forum here.

http://www.housebot.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=855604

In a nutshell, on my machine with Win XP MCE and dual core P4 (Presler 940), the SW remote for the X86 platform does not appear to work correctly. The property values that display dynamic values are all blanked out. All the fixed text appear correctly. When I switch from one page to another on the SW remote, the property values ARE there, they appear briefly and then disappear as if the value changed to a blank value.

I have tried switching the video card when someone suggested it could be a video card (I had to get a new Gfx card anyway). No dice. All my other machines have XP pro or XP home and are single cores, and none of them have problems.

I have tried the SW remote that was included with the Housebot 2.32 distribution - no luck. I am also using text with transparent backgrounds, but so is all the other text in my remote - the fixed text appears just fine.

I am wondering if the MCE variant of XP is causing problems somehow for the SW remote.

Thanks.

I'm not ignoring the issue... I just haven't been able to reproduce it on any of my machines. I believe it is probably a timing problem that effects the screen updating of the SWRemote and is probably effected by differences in CPU speed and graphics cards/drivers.

To help me isolate (and maybe one day duplicate) this problem, can you compare the effects of:

• Having the transparent property label over an image.
• On primary vs. pop-up panels (on and not on an image)

Hi Scott -

I posted this in the general forum, but I'm going to post it again here as a follow up to this issue. I understand that you can't replicate it - I'm not exactly sure what causes it myself but I do think it has something to do with how Windows and the video driver displaying the application. I'm not sure why it's picking on my new machine when all my older machines have had no issues. I've got both nVidia and ATI in my various machines.

Follow up question - can you clarify what you mean by an image - open up an image file or does the image file for buttons and the background count?

Response from another forum that I posted follows:

----------

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

loo_hoo_ser wrote:Follow up question - can you clarify what you mean by an image - open up an image file or does the image file for buttons and the background count?

I mean to have the property control on top of an image control (image control would be just providing some background).

FYI, I think I may have resolved the problem. I will post back when I know more.

Hi Scott -

I haven't tried what you suggested yet, but I do have more to add to this bug.

When I remote desktop into the MCE machine (the one running the blanking values in the SW remote), the values STILL blank out on the remote desktop client machine. I think we can rule out the video driver because the remote desktop session does not cure the problem. I believe that RDP bypasses window drawing through the RDP server's video driver layer and relies on the RDP client machine to do the window drawing through its video drivers instead.

Hope this adds some value.

I have a possible fix for the problem. Please try the version below. It will hopefully fix the problem and not cause any new ones. This version is for Win32 Software Remotes only (no WinCE or Pocket PC fix is included).

• Download this zip file.
• Backup the old \HouseBot\Clients\Winx86\SWRemote.exe file
• Unzip the new SWRemote.exe and copy it to all machines that are using the Software Remote.

Scott -

I downloaded the SWremote.exe that you just provided in the previous post and it fixed my problem!

This version of SWRemote is working fine now on my dual core setup now. To make sure, I tried it on another machine (that didn't have any problems) and it still works fine.

So far, so good - no problems (nothing else broken that I can see).

What was the fix?

P.S. you rock!

There was some code that, for transparent background property labels, was redrawing the background in addition to updating the property label. It used to be that if I didn't do this, the text updating on the property label would not erase the previous value and simply accumulate text until it was unreadable.

Looking very closely at this, it seemed possible that there could be a timing issue between when the property label was updated and when the background area was updated. Usually the background updated and then the control updated. But it looks like sometimes it happened in reverse.

I removed the logic that was redrawing the background and wasn't seeing the old behavior where the background redraw was even needed, so I just left it out. With all of the changes that have been put into the SWRemote over the years, it seems that it wasn't even needed any more (and now causing problems).

Scott,

This version fixed it for my computer also.

Mark

Fixed my problem too.
I found no new problems so far.

Thank you!

I bought Housebot recently and have been fighting redraw issues with my themes and popups for weeks. I just came across this software remote fix today and it seems to work well for me too. Thanks Scott!

By the way I work in high tech and hacked around with quite a few HA apps over the past few months before settling on Housebot. This really is a powerful, flexible product and I'm having success integrating all sorts of devices (X10 and wireless via the W800). I hope to contribute to the user community down the road. Keep up the good work!

Hunraken,

Welcome to the community and glad to hear that you're having success (and fun) getting your system setup.