Can't open control bar menues

[Ares Hovhannesyan]

Often I have a strange bug that happens when I work with Stager. I am not able to open menus on control bar  after clicking with mouse. (ex. File, Object, etc.) It happens not only for Stager app but with others also. 

The solution is to log out and log in into my windows 11 account. Would be interesting to know do anyone catch such a bug?

[AlanGilbertson]

Hi Ares,

I have not seen this specifically, but a variation of it is common. Stager (also Dimension) menus and application frame controls appear to operate normally but suddenly have no effect. For example, the File menu opens and clicking Close responds normally but the file doesn't close. The [X] button that normally closes an app window will respond to hover and click, but nothing actually happens. Keyboard commands are simply ignored. The UI components become "detached" from the app: all the bindings between OS-level and application-level are gone. Windows sees the app as still responsive, so the OS force close and error reporting never kick in.

This is common, and because it is also unpredictable I am diligent about saving Stager files after almost every edit, a habit carried over from Dimension. I also save frequent "safety versions" to avoid the "file won't open" scenario, which cost me many hours of lost work in Dimension, because Stager has not yet gained my trust in that regard.

[Ares Hovhannesyan]

Hi Alan, 

I never have this bug on win 10, May be it can be specefic for WIn 11.

[AlanGilbertson]

That's fascinating! It happened here with every version of Dimension, on two laptops and two desktop systems running Windows 10 through all of its updates and now Windows 11. These are all i7/i9 systems with Nvidia GPUs and 64GB RAM, so there may be a clue there if your hardware configurations are significantly different. It does sound as if we're seeing slightly different versions of the same underlying issue, though.

This behavior stands out as peculiar because until Dimension I had never run into it in almost 40 years of working with personal computers and software on Unix, CP/M, DOS, Mac OS and Windows. I've seen the phenomenon you describe, but not this one.