Strange IDE behavior - "PB/Win IDE has stopped working

[Steve Frye]

I have been experiencing this intermittently but fairly frequently.

I will want to delete a set of lines, so I click the mouse on the left border of the first line (ie, where home would take you), drag down until I've selected the lines I want to delete, release the mouse button, and press the delete key. The PB window gets a deathly white fuzziness and a MS Windows error message box appears. PDF doc with prt screen image of message is attached.

If I start the mouse drag a bit right of the left boundary, do the drag, etc, I have not experienced this behavior. Until tonight, I had not experienced it if I used the backspace key to delete a line instead of the delete key, but tonight I did have the failure while trying to use the backspace key.

I have booted into safe mode to rule out any other application interaction, and was able to recreate the behavior.

Has anyone else experienced this or can anyone else recreate it? As I said, I can go an hour without seeing it but then for 10 times in a row I can't use the delete key in this manner.

I can delete any other selected text with no difficulties, but along the left edge, to delete complete lines, it is iffy. I'm having to save about every 5 changes so I don't lose a bunch of stuff.

I would appreciate it if someone could reproduce the behavior so I'd know it wasn't something in my environment. Or if no one can reproduce it, I can start hunting down the culprit.

Steve

[Cliff Nichols]

Smells of a an Antivirus or Spyware hooking your IDE to me.

Try the same procedure and not have any spyware or antivirus program running, and see if you get the same results?

[Hedley Moses]

Smells of a an Antivirus or Spyware hooking your IDE to me.

Try the same procedure and not have any spyware or antivirus program running, and see if you get the same results?

I have threatfire behaviour based antivirus running alongside bitdefender antivirus. I get compile failures with threatfire switched on. Problems disappear when I switch off Threatfire. I have PB in the exclusion list of the antivirus but keep getting compile errors. I now have to ensure I switch off threatfire whenever I want to work with PB.

[Rodney Hicks]

Just musing here, but if I had to turn off a protection scheme to use PB, the protection scheme would stay turned off. There must be something about it that is not up to contemporary standards, especially if it is infiltrating the workings of another app.

[Steve Frye]

Cliff, you probably missed it, but I booted into safe mode with no network, no startups, almost no everything. I was able to reproduce the behavior in that environment. So I don't think it is antivirus.

For the record, I'm not going to disable my antivirus and/or firewall for any application. I don't have the luxury of having a non-networked system, so I won't risk infection. I don't understand (maybe just naive or ignorant) why the IDE would do anything intentionally that would invoke my protection software and if it did, why the protection software wouldn't give me the usual message that it had detected some suspicious activity. I would assume that if all my other apps work ok alongside my protection software, and PowerBasic is the exception, maybe it is PB that is doing something flaky, like writing in memory it isn't supposed to.

BUT, like I said at the beginning I don't think it has anything to do with protection software because protection software wasn't running in safe mode and PB failed there.

On the other hand, if I'm the only one experiencing this, it's probably my problem. That's why I asked for someone to try to reproduce it. But perhaps I'm the only one that deletes lines this way.

Steve

[John Gleason]

Or if no one can reproduce it, I can start hunting down the culprit.

I tried PB 8 and 9, mouse highlight from 1 to ~ a thousand lines both commented and not, then both backspace and delete with no problems.

[Steve Frye]

John,

Thanks for trying. On some days I can go a few hours without a glitch and others, I can't keep PB9 up (unless I avoid the delete key). Also, the number of lines is irrelevant. One line will cause it if it is going to happen. Sometimes just placing the cursor in the left-most position and pressing delete is sufficient.

[Bob Zale]

There is an extremely high probability that your issue is caused by anti-virus / spyware programs. Some must be totally uninstalled to prevent their improper operation.

Bob Zale
PowerBASIC Inc.

[Rodney Hicks]

BUT, like I said at the beginning I don't think it has anything to do with protection software because protection software wasn't running in safe mode and PB failed there.

This does not mean that it is not the protection software, especially if it has already infiltrated PB. If it affixed something to PB then the problem would show up in safe mode.
You may be lucky that it shows up because of PB, for it could be harvesting info from your machine from a lot of other programs and you are totally unaware of it.

[Cliff Nichols]

BUT, like I said at the beginning I don't think it has anything to do with protection software because protection software wasn't running in safe mode and PB failed there.

Although I will agree SafeMode it is less likely that AntiVirus/AntiSpyWare would be a cause but would not rule it out as they will run in SafeMode.

Problems disappear when I switch off <Insert Anti-Product-Name>

Sure do most the time, but sometimes not, because the service is still running even though you closed the program.

Some must be totally uninstalled to prevent their improper operation.

True, unless you know what services are being used, and close every service, program or linked program that they start up to keep you from stopping their protection.

Case in Point AVG:
Although I tell it to not start on bootup, and set their services to manual start, if I watch processes, I see multiple AVG processes that create more when I kill them (All of which from time to time create unexpected results in my code testing regardless of the language I am using at the moment)