Digital Workshop

Hi All,

I use Opus Pro 5.5...

I have a publication that uses the Publication Search action. It works fine on my XP machines.

When I run the same publication on a Windows 98 machine, or an ME machine, when I Close the Search Dialog box, a residue of the previous 'from' screen remains in place of the box. I can move the cursor over the area, and it 'wipes' the residue.

(The W98 machine is a 600 MHZ machine with current drivers, Direct X, Windows Media Player, etc)

This publication was originally created in Presenter 4.5. When I publish it using Presenter, the Search works fine on both the Windows 98, and ME machines.

So it appears to me that the issue is with Pro 5.5, rather than the machines.

I've attached a simple imp that illustrates the problem....

Is anyone else having a similar problem ?

I'm open to any suggestions...

(The same scenario, above, occurs with the Bookmark Dialog box, however I do have a 'work-around' for that.)

Steve Hawley

Hi,
I have had a similar thing happen several times with 5.5 and it is as though the cursor acts like a board cleaner in that you can wipe the residue away.
I have also had other strange things happening like I am working in the pages then decide to preview the publication but there is no response, I can save the publication but it won't let me close Opus. I have to use task manager to close it but then when you fire up opus again it states that another copy of the pub is opened by another user. In the end I have to restart the PC to get going again.
Something is definately adrift and these things did not happen in 5.14
Regards
John

Hi John,

I also had the identical problems you describe, when I first started using
Pro 5.5 (vs Presenter 4.5).

Through many hours of troubleshooting, I found that a certain combination of file-access actions would consistently cause the program to fail, as described. If I slowed the file accesses with delays, the program stopped crashing. (Again, this did not happen in Presenter 4.5)

DW support did work on that problem, and they did resolve it with a patch; the version of Pro I now have is 5.51. Maybe you can get the same patch from them.

==========

As to the residue problem, which also happens with the Bookmark Dialog,
DW support could not duplicate my problem, however, they since they tested it on a machine with three times the speed of my machine, it is no wonder that they could not duplicate the problem. The speed of my 'problem' machine, at 630MHZ, is well within the requirements specified by DW.

And the fact that I do not have the same problem when using Presenter 5.5, should be a clue that there is some short coming in Pro 5.5.

I devised a klugish work around for the Bookmark problem, but I'm at a loss with this Search problem.

Thanks for your reply....

I have literally just got off the phone from a client who is experiencing the same problems and thus I will be keen to find a solution to this. My clients machines are running on MS Win 2000 & XP.

Hello again,
The PC I have been using and getting these residue problems plus others which I will mention has a 3Ghz processor and 1Gb RAM, I have even set the display hardware acceleration to non but the problem still pops up.
Here's another couple of arisings which bothered me:
I already had a publication with pages which played an audio narration and then had an action on conclusion of the sound file. Copied a few of these pages into a new publication with the intention of using different audio tracks - however, to my surprise, XE5.5 would not allow me to change the file to be played but just stuck on the old name. Publishing also showed an odd thing, I had deleted all the contents of these few pages i.e. pictures and also tried to purge the pub etc but when published errors were highlighted that could not find the resources but they were not there anyway ?
Yesterday, simple action on a button to go to a certain page - the button had an action to go to a different page previously - button still went to the same page. I had to delete the button, reboot the PC, put a new button on the page and then it worked.
At this stage I am tempted to not develop any more publications in XE5.5 but revert back to the XE5 with SR1 for the time being unless the DW guys are working on a new patch.
Regards
John

Hi John,

I'm not at all familiar with XE, but your experience sounds very much like the problems I had when I converted from Presenter to Pro. (It was a nightmare).

I do have one suggestion. One of many problems that I had was that Pro would arbitrarily create multiple copies of the same object, often all the objects, on a single page. If I changed, or deleted an object, etc, it would not take affect because there were other identical objects on the page. I had to delete all the duplicate objects in order to proceed normally. So, check for duplicate objects....

Good luck !

Steve Hawley