I have searched throughout the archive but surprisingly enough didn't see any thread related to that problem. Most of you LS users must know though that the Automatic Windows Update doesn't seem to work properly in LS: You get the little globe icon in the systray but when you hover it *poof* it disappears... The only way to apply the update is to switch to explorer, click that icon, apply the update and go back to LS...
Is there a known workaround/fix for this problem? There seems to be some sneaky explorer dependency with the way this works...

Thanks!

try to go at microsoft.com... and don't forget to backup your system drive before :)

*nods at smurth* disable the auto update service, and just go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and download the stuff manually.

That's pretty much what I have been doing, The geek in me (40% at the Geek test = Major Geek :) still is curious about what is the reason for that disappearing icon. I understand that people at MS would probably be the ones to ask the question to but I thought I'd try it here first...

So thats why that happens. When running the explorer shell I spent an hour investigating how to enable it on my work machine since my work had disabled it in the policy. I didn't notice for some after installing LS that it wasn't working. I don't miss it anyway :) I got sick of prompts for all these stupid little updates every week.

These "stupid little updates" prevent my webserver from script kiddies and other LDOSA (Lame Denial Of Service Attacks) since the only updates that come through to the Automatic Windows Update are "critical" updates i.e. security related patches which /me needs and /me loves :)
The thing is I'm not sure how one could know what makes that icon disappear. Obviously it receives a mouse hover message and upon that message must be checking something (maybe that the current shell is explorer) and then desactivate itself if that test fails. But what exactly the test is and how to circumvent it I would be curious to know....

I would believe that the utility you are speaking of is part of the explorer shell.

But if it is then surely the icon shouldn't appear in the systray in the first place? If it does that means that there is some service running that puts it here and I would expect that same service to handle a mouse click on the icon...

not if that mouse click goes to part of the explorer shell directly via something like a CLSID.

I see, that makes sense. So what could be happening is that the thing is simply crashing when it tries to execute whatever it has to execute on a mouse hover.
As a more general comment, that's the one thing that keeps making me uninstall Litestep (until I see a really cool theme I want to try :), all these explorer bound functionality that don't have equivalents in litestep ("open containing folder" after a download comes to mind but there are many others). Would it be possible to add support for these features in Litestep? Maybe have some out of proc COM component with the required CLSID registering itself upon startup (Actually could be part of litestep.exe itself calling CoRegisterClassObject on startup) and emulating the right behaviors?

there are dde engines that are out there for LS to help out with this sort of thing. However, as long as M$ keeps putting applications like Find and Update into the shell, which is where they shouldn't be, there isn't anything the LS devs can do about it. Now...to get around it you could always setup something in your scheduler to go to Windows Update and get the current updates, should be possible at least.

Well ummm... M$ doesn't exactly document these features. In fact, the entire systray story is pretty much undocumented. You only get to know how your app can register an icon, but the sourcecode of the tray which handles the icons or of the windows taskbar is not really available... The DUN icon alone took months to get to work correctly. We're trying our best and we are aware of the windows update icon issue, but it's not like we could check MSDN to see how it works. If you know the solution feel free to send me an email.

when i updated my indiestep this problem dissapeared. but i've got ILS-2003-05-13. now when i checked indiestep's site, this version wasn't there anymore (the newest was 2003-02-09). what is this all about? where has it gone???

2003-05-13 is a nightly build from ShellFront. The indie LS page only lists "stable" builds but also provides a links to lsdev@sfo :)

just a side note.

it's been my experience that it's always a good idea to do any work with Windows while under explorer. i use LiteStep when doing general computer use. If i'm doing something like updating windows or trying to fool around with particular programming projects, i do it all under explorer. it minimizes the chances for miscommunication between the shell and the os.

oh, thnx ilmcuts :)
anyway, my systray works well and no complaints about stability.

Thanks for the feedbacks!

DeViLbOi: the only thing I know how to do would be to popup http://windowsupdate.com in ie. For the time being I will switch to explorer whenever I see the systray icon and apply the updates there.

ilmcuts: I understand the "undocumented" issues and unfortunatly do not know how to handle the update icon. I will try the 2003-05-13 build though (I'm currently running 02-09 and last time I checked shellfront was down) but you would know if that worked under 05-13 wouldn't you? :)

pika: Yes I'm doing the same, my problem though is that I am a developer and use litestep at work. Work means I can't afford using a shell that takes more time to get things achieved. Now for 80% of the tasks I get things done faster in litestep (love the *hotkey!) but I also often have to change my configuration, install new apps etc... which is not as easily done in LS. So I keep installing litestep, getting frustrated by the missing functionalities (I understand very well that the problems come from having too many undocumented things in the shell), unstalling it, looking at ls.net saying "ooh I have to try this" and reinstalling litestep :)

I must say though that LS has come a loooonnng way since I first tried it back in 1998... In particular IMO OTS is one of the biggest advance (of course stability is also a good thing :) ).

Anyways enough rambling, I'll keep an eye on that windows update thing and will let you know if I find anything.

/me needs to be slapped... I just tried 05-17 and it works! The latest build handles the windows update systray icon just fine. Ah.. what a great dev team :)
I did notice that it took longer for LS to load up though (you get stuck on that login screen longer than with 02-09 for some reason and I am not using any custom login screen, just the goold old standard XP one. It seems like it's waiting for something and times out but then again this has been reported many times, I just find it odd that it's worse with 05-17 than it was with 02-09).

So before I post anything next time, I'll try the latest version :P

by "good old standard XP one", do you mean the default XP logon, with the names to the right, with pictures next to each?

Yes that's the one I mean :)
I also tried reverting to the really "good old one" (that is the dialog box a la windows NT / 2000) but that didn't make any difference.

Just for the sake of it, I retried using the old logon dialog (I hadn't tried with the newest build) and "therrre you go" ("My Big Fat Greek Wedding" fans will understand) no waiting anymore. Thanks for the reminder deuce!
So my list of annoyances is really getting small :) There is still the "open folder" after a download but that's really starting to look like nitpicking...

yeah, that's a pretty well known bug. no one's figured out a fix yet, but using the "classic" windows logon is a good work around.