I have a strange problem:

I have windows XP Pro at home that stays on logged in 24x7. After anywhere from 24 to 72+ hours I will bring up the popup menu and the entire screen will freak out and have windows popping up everywhere and strange odd looking things going on. I cannot recycle litestep and the way I have been clearing this up is to simply log out and log back in. Has anyone seen these behaviors before? I can't seem to find any mention of it on the forums. I suspect that it is a memory leak or something of that nature seeing as this happens only after a certain amount of time. I will try and include screen shots of the freakiness but I am not 100% certain I can take the screen shots. Any ideas on how to fix this would be great. I am at a loss of even where to start.

Cheers,

Beowulf

FYI

The machine is a Athlon 1.53Ghz with 512MB of RAM
Nvidia GeForce Ti 4200 Video card
Windows XP Service Pack 1
This has happens with

LiteStep Installer (omar)2.1 1-4
ls-installer 2.0.1

Anything else you would like know let me know.

From what you've told us I don't see anything out of the ordinary that would cause it. Does it happen regardless of what theme you are running?

Herm that is a really good question, I usally only run the Simplcity theme that ships with the installer. I do remove a few featuers that I do not want, but beyond that it is a standard install of the theme. I will try a different theme and let you know the results in a few days.

Cheers,

Beowulf

Off to find a new theme...

eh? 2.1 1-4 2.0.1? I remember seeing something like this before, but I'm still confused...
It really sounds like a memory leak, check task manager next time it happens. About the screenshots, hit printscreen and paste it into IrfanView or so.

If it's happening with Simplicity then I doubt it's the theme causing the problem since I've never heard of this bug before.

At least make sure you are running the current indie build.

It happens with both of the versions that I have tried recently

2.1 1-4 and 2.0.1, I have been somewhat neglgent in keeping up to date.

In task manager the litestep process does not appear to be using signifgantly more memory

One additonal thing to add to the problem. I just realized I like to have my popup and my taskbar set to display Icons. I had a theme that did not show Icons for three or so days and then finally got around to tweaking it out to show Icons and then boom, the same behaviour. As far as I can tell this is the source of the problem.

The popup icon code is known to leak GDI objects. This shouldn't really matter on 2k/XP though... make sure you use the latest version of popup2, some GDI leaks were fixed in late 2002 (but there's still at least one huge leak in the icon code :p).
If you really want to keep the icons enabled you could also replace !PopupDynamicFolder with !PopupFolder. The dynamic version leaks each time you open a submenu, the "regular" version should only leak once per startup/!recycle. Plus it's a lot faster. The only disadvantage is that you have to !recycle for popup2 to notice any changes in the folder(s) it points to using !PopupFolder. That shouldn't really matter though unless you install a dozen new programs on a daily basis or so...

hmmm.. maybe updating your litestep build might help too..

it seems to me you're still using the installers' litestep version - updating to the latest indiestep build usually solved any bigger problems that occured..

get it here: http://indiestep.sourceforge.net/

Now that the popupicons GDI mem leak bug is wellknown, I can guess that bpopup has the same bug; right ?

Actually, lsdev@shellfront has an ever more recent build that indiestep.sf.net. ;)

Smurth: yes, it's just popup2 with renamed commands.

there's an even more updated version of popup2 on phil's site, i thought changes were going to be added to the cvs.

Ok so I have pulled the latest build and replaced just the popup2.dll, so here goes nothing :P

If I only use bpopup for !popuptasks with "popupicons true", will I feel annoyance from the popup GDI leak ?

ithink that the gdileak affects those icons too

Ok...now I REALLY have to say something because this is annoying as hell. Many times in threads when people say they are having problems with themes the answer has been "Make sure you have the latest IndieStep Build!" Now why on Earth would anyone want to downgrade from LS Beta 4 to something released in Feb.? I mean come on folks...you are talking about something that hasn't even been touched for 4 months and that will be going away. To me it seems like a big ole cop out answer when you don't really want to help someone and thats BS.

ok, you shouldn't downgrade, but you should use the updated modules from them as the are the most recent versions until they get compiled against 0.24.7 b4( or any .7 build for that matter) if you install using the lastest litstep installer (ver 2.6 i beleive) and then upgraded to b4 you should and good to good. hopefully.

There was actually a bug in LS where after multiple hibernations LS would not return. This was patched in b4...