HotkeyNet Help

[Chilla]

The upper left is blank (white) right? It doesn't have a red X in it?

Correct. I will email you the file now. Thanks for all the help.

[Freddie]

I got the file. Thank you! The file is perfectly okay, and it works fine with HotkeyNet on my PC.

Before we go on, let me say how much I appreciate your help and patience with this. HotkeyNet's in beta, meaning that users are supposed to find bugs and I'm supposed to fix them. You've done a dynamite job of locating a bug. Nobody else has reported this bug even though the beta test has been going on for five months and now has 175 steady participants. Since you're the only one who has reported the bug, and I can't reproduce it myself, I'm going to need your help to pinpoint the cause so I can fix it. And I would really like to do that. So I hope your patience will hold out!

Since this happens on your PC but not mine, let's try to see what's different about your PC. If it's not too much trouble, could you run a Windows utility that puts some info about your system configuration in a text file and then email the file to me? The way you run the utility is, go to Start, select Run, type dxdiag, then press Enter.

Also let me ask a question. You said HKN had been working and then this problem appeared suddenly. Are you aware of anything that changed in your PC (software, hardware, anything) just before things went haywire? Did you change the way you launch HotkeyNet? Change WoW? Change anything?

Thank you so much!

[Chilla]

Glad to help. As far as I know I didn't change anything about how I run the program or with my computer. I will email you my computer information in a few minutes. Just to give it a shot, I might completely remove HotkeyNet and reinstall and see if that helps.

[Freddie]

Could you also email me a file called "hotkeynet.settings" that HKN created in the file where you installed it? As you can probably guess, that contains your settings for the program.

[Freddie]

I loaded your settings file and hotkey file into build 104, and unfortunately they worked perfectly fine on my pc. So we're no closer to finding the bug.

I'm trying to think of how to diagnose this long distance. The problem is affecting both the screen display and whether the command gets carried out. Those things are done in separate threads. I'm trying to think of what could affect both threads. Not a whole lot.

Well, let's try stepping through the chain of events as much as we can.

1. Press load hotkeys and type in the name of a non-existent file (just type random letters).

2. Press "Open." HotkeyNet will fail to find the file, so none will be loaded.

3. Press "Show loaded hotkeys" to be sure no hotkeys are loaded. The little window should say "Number of hotkeys: 0."

4. Press Ctrl. You should see <Ctrl> in the upper right. Let me know if you don't.

5. Press R You should see <R> in the upper right. Let me know if you don't.

6. Assuming you see those things, load your real hotkey file.

7. Press Ctrl and R again. Do you still see <Ctrl> and <R> in the upper right when you press them? If not, let me know.

[Chilla]

Unfortunately I didn't see Ctrl or R in the box you described. Really strange. It's like any key makes the error (beep) noise and nothing shows in either of the top boxes.

[Freddie]

Okay. I think we've gone as far as we can with our naked eyeballs and it's time to bring in the heavy artillery.

What I'd like to do next is make a special build for you that will create a file containing a record of the program's internal activity as it starts up. Then you can email me that file and (hopefully!) I'll be able to see exactly where in the code the problem is occurring. How's that sound?

In case you're feeling like your work was wasted and I could have done this earlier, I couldn't, because I needed to get a sense of the general location of the problem. I'm not sure I have enough of a sense even now but there doesn't seem to be any alternative.

[Freddie]

Chilla, if you don't mind, could you download the special build from this link:

http://www.hotkeynet.com/p/download_debug.html

That pages explain what to do. Thanks, this is a big help.