An INFORMATION to all who have some PROBLEMS:
*********************************************
MOST IMPORTANT:
You should try to update your LS to the 3.02 OTS2 Installer (means in particular: NetLoadModule v2.4.3 and LS 0.24.7 RC1)
With some luck your problems will be gone, especially NetLoadModule has get important bugfixes in 2.4.3 ;)

Well, the Failures caused from the other modules itself, is not the fault of Gathering or the Theme. We and our Beta testers don't had them :|
Also everyone has another system with unique settings, so most of the above posted Windows Problems are totally new for me :|

The Popup Version Popup2-2.1.2 seems to have sometimes some problems, update to a newer one:
Open themevars.rc in the config-folder (of each skin if you use them) and change the line

to

or whatever version currently is the newest I think "popup2-2.1.6"
WinXP or Win2000 users can try updating to lsbox-3.0-pre (but this is a beta prerelease!!)
Open themevars.rc in the config-folder (of each skin if you use them) and change the line

to


For the users of Win9x/WinME:
Try to disable the Icondesk Module (That is maybe the problem (Thought i fixed it by using the older version like Austerity))
The quick hack:
Open themevars.rc in the config-folder (of each skin if you use them) and search the following lines

and change it to something like that


Attention: You will get the module download window "noicondesk-0.55" after recycle -> Just click cancel
Hopefully Gathering starts :|
Now Deactivate The Desktop via the Shift-Leftclick Config-Menu and don't reactivate it ;)

Good Luck
Andymon

Well, on 98SE and 98 the IconDesk was causing the crash on startup. Once that was removed, popup2-2.1.2 could not be found. I then switched to popup2-2.1.6, and it loaded fine... actually, at first it didn't; I reinstalled using EZ2 Install, Omar's Installer 2.something, 3.0, all to no avail. Then I tried Omar's installer 3.0, and it loaded up. It seems that Omar's Installer 3.02 is ABSOLUTELY necessary.

Now Gathering works... until I recycle, then the UI disappears, but does not return; all wallpaper baby. Litestep however is still running, and can only be closed by CTRL-ALT-DEL, and CTRL-ALT-F1 (Forcibly terminate...). It is possible to then rerun litestep, and the theme loads up with any changes that were made. However, after a couple recycles (with this glitch), Litestep, as well as Explorer end up crashing (on recycle), leaving me with no way to get an interface back.

Half way there tho!

It pry needs litestep .24.7 beta RC1

Even with all the changes, it still hangs when installing/switching the theme. I have the latest public build of omar's installer. Win98SE.

24.7 beta RC1 was tried. As well as 24.6 just for good measure.

I want to say that blkhawk isn't supporting 9x anymore especially with LSBox...but I could be wrong.

@HovaQ:
LSBox ReadMe Quote:
"if you have IE4 and a newer version of comdlg32.dll installed installed. comdlg32.dll is usually included with IE"
This is required, maybe you havn't the comdlg32.dll in the newer version??

@Liquid Circuit:
Now Gathering works... until I recycle, then the UI disappears, but does not return
Well, you system obviously seems to have problems with the recycle animations (why? i don't know)
Try to deactivate it.
Open the "Themevars.rc" and search the line

and set this to 1
(maybe this helps, but i cannot promise)
A question: Does this also happen if you recycle WITHOUT THE GATHERING RECYCLE, means call !Recycle via LSXCommand or Ctrl+Alt+F1
If this works, tell me and i tell you how to fix your problem, if not i have no clue.

@DeViLbOi:
You're right, but this only is true for the new LSBox-3.0-pre version the included one LSBox 2.95 works on all OS (Well you need IE4 and some windows dll in actual version, should everyone have).

Andymon

I have IE6 SP1, so I think I have the latest version.

LS-Universe: No problem with the recycle animation. Found the problem, an error was occuring while trying to close jdesk-0.70. I changed the themevars id to jdesk-0.711, and this fixed the problem. However with jdesk-0.711 running, the desktop area is constantly set at full screen (covering the theme), but recycles work. I then set the manual override of the destop area to something apropriate, and that worked. However, with this manual desktop area set, now recycles cause a blue screen of death. However, I then took a "snapshot" of the setup, and everything works perfectly. It seems as though jdesk is conflicting with another module, as I'm sure I've had jdesk-0.711 running perfectly in other themes.

This is somewhat acceptable (for the time being). At least I can set up the location of all the boxes, then manually (forcibly) terminate Litestep, and restart it with the new settings (For ThemeStyles, and such). Then I can take a snapshot, and have my theme setup how I want it, and it will still be stable.

LS-Universe: Another note... initially I wasn't getting the error message regarding jdesk-0.70. However, once I disabled EVERY option for the desktop (from shift-leftclick), it began to appear fairly consistantly on Litestep quit/recycle. Obviously, that is what led me to try another version of jdesk.

liquid circuit: the setdesktoparea syntax changed from 0.70 to 0.711, which is probably why you were having problems with it... its in the docs, but not in the changelog

doy: really? hmm... I set the $myCustomDesktopArea$ (this may not be the correct variable name; I'm not on my home computer at the moment) in themevars.rc and the desktop area DID (I repeat, DID) change to what I entered. I figured that the syntax may have changed from 0.70 to 0.711, so I figured that that was what was initially causing the problem. So, because of this, I didn't expect the manual override to work, but it did (paradoxically). This leads me to think the manual override works somehow differently than the inbuilt desktop area settings.

LS-Universe:

Just wondering if you had any hypotheses as to why I'm having problems in Gathering with jdesk-0.70 and 0.711.

My lsslider crash hypothesis:

You disabled the volume box, or do anything that would disable the lsslider module.

You then swith themes or styles to something that does use this module, say Minimalix.

Litestep crashes.

I doubt this is the whole story though. I have the idea that the Gathering themeskin specifies which modules load, so the other themes crash but Gathering doesnt... just an idea.

As we "now" know is, that on some systems jDesk has problems with other modules, but we got no idea why.
atm we're working on a further version of Gathering where you're allowed to choose between jDesk and Desktop2. it's a little more work for us, but we're trying our best that it will work on nearly every system. Cause of users bug report at recycle, we decidet also to include a setting which allows to turn off the fading-recycle (via themepopup).

We know that 9x and ME user could not run lsbox-3.0-pre, cause this module can never run with these OS, so we decidet to use an older version. We also know that xlabel's true transparency does not work with 9x.
karlhe is right, on some few systems it seems like lsslider does not work, so we have to try out how we could "fix" it.
what I can't understand is, that minimalix crashes, that's a thing which doesn't make any sense to me, but as we know... sh** happens, or is it Murphys Law :S?
Another idea is, if you don't have the gdiplus.dll, rainmeter could crash (should be in $LitestepDir$, but it's original includet with omars installer)

We're realy have to say sorry to all users where Gathering issn't work right. But we don't realy know why it works on the most systems, but not on yours. That's why we're making these changes and hope that most will be fixed then.

Thanks for the comments ls-universe, even if it doesn't work on my PC, thats my fault for not using a newer OS I guess :). Its still a great looking theme :)

HovaQ:
If you want to, we could send you tomorrow a 98 possible starting version which will be Gathering v1.1 on release (not finished yet, but you could try it and tell us bugs) :)

Sure I would love to try it again :)

@HovaQ:
ok, nice :) right now Andymon is working on xlabel-2.3 with some features we've now scripted with mzscript, so these things are now in the module :)
but if it's finished with the re-worked code I'll sent the theme with the module to you're mail :)

ls-universe: I'd like to give that 98 version a test run too... however I don't think my email inbox can handle attachements greater than 1 meg (Hotmail).

LiquidCircuit:
if it's finished in the next days, I'll upload it to my server and give you the url to download :)

killer... hopefully I'll have my Neuropsychopharmacology paper done by then. :)