Windowblinds & Directory Opus V9 or V10

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Windowblinds & Directory Opus V9 or V10

Bug in WB?

By MikeO on May 7, 2011 5:03:54 AM from

Stardock Forums

Guys

I am trying to figure out whether it's a bug in Dopus or Windowblinds or even something else..

Can you please use your favourite wb skin, load up directory opus and perform the following?

a.) In Dopus, go to help/license manager

b.) Click Install New Certificate

c.) Click Load

Does the explorer dialogue paint correctly?

Please let me know your results and version of WB used, thanks!

+3 Karma | 101 Replies

Quoting c242,

reply 49

So leads me to the question: Is the WB developer aware of this thread ?

Yes, Carl....Neil knows ....

It's still Neil. Okay.

Quoting garbanz0,

reply 47

unfortunately it didn't fix the issue with the top toolbar that i have with some skins. this is one that gives me trouble, maybe you can install it and see if you can reproduce the problem. it would be great to finally get these guys off my back about the whole uxtheme issue...

http://tomrichter.deviantart.com/art/7zone-163832493

anyway, i'm very glad to see an Opus dev working to sort this all out. thanks very much for your time and effort!

Installing that theme, I can reproduce the toolbar/maximized problem, and with just Window Blinds 7 installed (no msstyle stuff going on).

Seems like a problem with the theme itself to me, though.

It is making parts of the tops of windows transparent/translucent when they shouldn't be. It also affects other programs. e.g. The XPS Viewer that comes with Windows 7 has all sorts of drawing problems with its toolbar, and seems to have more problems when maximized. The MSPaint program that comes with Windows 7 has the exact same line at the top of the maximized window showing through to the desktop/wallpaper below (and when not maximized also draws the titlebar off the top of the window, which is quite odd).

That theme seems to be playing games with the window titlebar metrics to me. Not just making the titlebars smaller, but making them only *appear* smaller while they're not really that small. Or something like that.

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Themes at Deviant Art are not moderated the way they are at WinCustomize... for content nor "workability".

http://www.wincustomize.com/explore/windowblinds/7155/

Is the theme here. I wonder if it causes the same problem, LeoDavidson?

thanks for testing things out, leo.

DrJBHL, the "version" at WinCustomize creates the same problems. too bad the author hasn't been around for a while, i guess my favorite skin is dead in the water

Try pm'ng Tom, or emailing him through WC and dA... http://wincustomize.com/users/3219847/TomRichter or http://users.wincustomize.com/TomRichter/ for here.

Sorry I have not posted before but I am currently working on another project.

It looks like we should remove dopus from the internal exclusion list in the next update then.

Regarding the skin, the OS caption height setting may need changing to something more like 15 rather than the current 19.

Agreed. I tested it against a couple of essorant's skins I purchased and the problem did not exist there.

Interested parties should pm TomRichter.

Good news Neil, thanks for letting us know.

I PM'd TomRichter about the skin. I also tried changing the OS Caption Height to 15, but it didn't change anything...

Quoting Neil Banfield,

reply 57

Sorry I have not posted before but I am currently working on another project.

It looks like we should remove dopus from the internal exclusion list in the next update then.

Thanks Neil!

Leo : Does the new official update (10.0.1.0) contain these fixes ?

Quoting c242,

reply 61

Leo : Does the new official update (10.0.1.0) contain these fixes ?

It doesn't. Having confirmed what/where the problem is, we're leaving it up to Stardock to fix Windowblinds, rather than making Opus patch their code.

Is this fixed with 7.20d ?

I would also like to know if this has been sorted

Here's a temp fix that works great.

1. Reboot into Safe Mode so that you can edit WindowBlinds' files.

2. Backup 'wblind.dll' or 'wblind64.dll' for 64-bit Windows. (By default, the files are in 'C:\Program Files\Stardock\Object Desktop\WindowBlinds')

3. Depending on your Windows, open either 'wblind.dll' or 'wblind64.dll' in a hex editor and look for 'DOPUS.EXE'.

4. When you find it, edit it to something like 'AAAAA.AAA'. You can put in anything but make sure you only edit the spaces for 'DOPUS.EXE' and nothing else.

5. Save the file & reboot. You'll see that DOpus is now being skinned.

The downside is you'll have to repeat the above steps whenever you update WB but it's not like WB is updated daily so no worries.

Mmmm

I also have a problem with Opus and WB, but not a skin problem

I just updated to the 7.3 version and I noticed a strange behavior with GPsoft Opus software.

When drag/drop files using the Opus directory explorer (replacing windows explorer) I don't have pointer anymore inside the Opus windows. And the transfers progress window doesn't display anymore.
It worked well on the 7.2

WindowBlinds version : WindowBlinds 7.2 (build 297 - Windows 7 Edition) - 64 bit OS

Opus 10.0.1.0.1492 x64

Any idea ?

I'm using DoPus v10 also, and WB 7.3 -- and have the same problem with the mouse when dragging files or folders.

But, the progress screen does show.

I'm using 32-bit, not 64-bit -- maybe that makes a difference.

Here is my OPOUS 9 and windows explorer as you can see I do not see any problems

Quoting Mark Phelps,

reply 67

I'm using 32-bit, not 64-bit -- maybe that makes a difference.

x64 and no mouse when dragging, but the progress screen is fine.

Quoting Smart_Fury,

reply 66

Opus 10.0.1.0.1492 x64

Might want to update Opus (I have 10.0.2.0.4269 x64)

Quoting chillychan,

reply 65

Here's a temp fix that works great.

1. Reboot into Safe Mode so that you can edit WindowBlinds' files.

2. Backup 'wblind.dll' or 'wblind64.dll' for 64-bit Windows. (By default, the files are in 'C:\Program Files\Stardock\Object Desktop\WindowBlinds')

3. Depending on your Windows, open either 'wblind.dll' or 'wblind64.dll' in a hex editor and look for 'DOPUS.EXE'.

4. When you find it, edit it to something like 'AAAAA.AAA'. You can put in anything but make sure you only edit the spaces for 'DOPUS.EXE' and nothing else.

5. Save the file & reboot. You'll see that DOpus is now being skinned.

The downside is you'll have to repeat the above steps whenever you update WB but it's not like WB is updated daily so no worries.

I LOVE YOU!

This problem seems to have gotten worse.

We just got a report via the Directory Opus support channel that the File Open dialogs are not showing up *at all* in Opus when WindowBlinds is installed.

Installing the latest WindowBlinds (from CNet, signed by Stardock on 10-Nov-2011) on a test machine (Win7 64-bit) confirmed this to be the case. Any action in Opus which is meant to trigger a standard file dialog now does nothing.

EDIT: Some of the Aero-based themes appear to cause fewer problems, but you can reproduce what I'm talking about using the "Sublime", "Win8" or "Win8 Metro" themes which come with WB (and probably several others; that's just what I tried).

The WindowBlinds DLLs also still look for DOPUS.EXE and still causes Opus to be completely unskinned, just like six months ago. Renaming a random program to DOPUS.EXE causes the same problems in it (no skins, no File Open dialogs).

Hex-editing the DLLs to overwrite the "DOPUS.EXE" string still fixes all the problems, like six months ago. After doing that, Opus is skinned properly and the File Open dialogs work and look normal again.

So it seems like there has been no progress in applying the fix we provided six months ago. Rather than progress, WindowBlinds is now breaking Opus even worse than before.

What do we have to do to see this problem actually get fixed?

Given that this looks like a problem in Opus unless you know all the details, people with WindowBlinds installed are wrongly blaming Opus for it. This is damaging Opus's reputation and wasting our support time and our mutual users' time.

We're being left with no choice but to make Opus detect WindowBlinds on startup and display a message explaining that WindowBlinds is to blame and that Stardock have failed to fix the problem after over six months even after we proved where the problem was and how to fix it in a way that would take less than five minutes to implement (just remove the DOPUS.EXE string from the WB code).

We'd rather the problem was simply fixed but have run out of patience. This is deeply frustrating. Software that modifies the OS to the extent that WindowBlinds does, and which can cause such incompatibilities with other programs, needs to be updated more proactively than this.

I posted on your blog about this, but I thought I should post here too.

Firstly these forums are NOT the right place to send bug reports like the above. They should always go to support@stardock.com so that they can be tracked and forwarded on internally.

Additionally if you did want to post on the forums it would have been better to post a new thread so it would have been more visible and posting just before Christmas is not ideal either!

An alternative would have been to find someone on #stardock on irc.stardock.com or sending a PM to any of the mods on WC. Generally these things would then have found their way to the right people, though as it was Christmas I cannot promise how long it would have taken!

Anyway :

I have looked into this and it appears there was a big miscommunication between us.

There was a report of issues back in May and we modified WB for the next update to remove the DOPUS.EXE line from the source code. Unfortunately the search missed the fact there was a second reference to it in a header file and for some reason QA did not actually test this - I will be finding out why this is.

After this we marked it as sorted and nobody has contacted the development team to let them know otherwise. We were not ignoring the issue we simply didn't know about it!

Did you send any mails to support@stardock.com identifying yourself as the author and explaining the fix did not work. Doing so should have resulted in the information getting to me eventually, but it seems for whatever reason this did not happen.

Anyway I apologise for the problem and I have modified the code and removed the second reference to dopus from the code. The next update should resolve this, but obviously if you encounter any more issues please do contact support in the manner I describe above.

Regarding the other issues, the resizing from the top corner issue is pretty minor and I can live with that right now as fiddling with that code could cause other more serious issues. The problem with the explorer selection when using the keyboard is interesting. I have not heard of that before, but I imagine not many people use the keyboard in explorer in that way. I will see about getting that fixed for the next update too.

BTW in case there was any doubt, the reason why dopus was in the 'bad app' list originally was because of how it worked on Windows XP in the past. I cannot recall exactly what the issue was, but the source code says :

"Directory OPUS assumes things about theme handles, so its excluded at this level"

I suspect it did not handle the case of a theme handle returning NULL which was entirely possible and permitted on Windows XP (the docs even warned developers about it)

Anyway we are always willing to work with other developers on issues encountered with WB and have in fact been working with the DisplayFusion guys recently in enhancing WB such as adding in specific custom sections for their needs. We are not fixing bugs in WB but actually adding things to they can render things identically to how WB does for the taskbar and start button.

If you did contact support@stardock.com regarding this please do provide me with the ticket IDs so I can investigate what went wrong so we can try to ensure it does not happen again.

Leo: It is NOT the right way to bring up people against You or Stardock by writing stupid update notifications into Directory Opus. I use WindowBlinds since over 10 years, Directory Opus since 3. Guess how my loyalty is weighted ?

Such childish behaviour does no purpose in any way.

Neil, while You are here You might want to look at the newest betas of Total Commander, especially the 64bit one. Menubars are not looking right with WB enabled.

Quoting c242,

reply 73

Huh? We waited over 6 months for a fix, to problems which had existed & been reported by other people for longer than that, then found reports that the problem was not only still there but that Opus was now being completely broken by WindowBlinds. I posted here about that development and got no response after two weeks.

We wanted people to know that if they saw a problem it wasn't our fault, so I posted about the problem on our news blog.

Posts to the news blog are shown when a new version of Opus is detected, or when you manually run the update checker, but that's it. There is no notification in Opus specific to this issue, although we are also considering it (only for WindowBlinds DLLs detected as causing problems, not for WindowBlinds in general; if it gets fixed then we have no reason to show any message, and we don't show any message today either way) as not everyone will see the news blog and the program looks completely broken, with no indication that it's actually WindowBlinds and not Opus that is causing the problem.

I also know that when we make a claim that another program is causing a problem with Opus, many people would not believe us and would ask why the problem only affects Opus and not other tools, so I had to back up my statements with the details shown in the video.

If you can point to anything that I've said which is wrong, I'll happily correct it. Other than that, if people must pick sides, I'd expect people to side with the company that had the problem inflicted upon them, not the company that caused the problem and did nothing to fix it, and I'd expect some appreciation of the fact that we, despite not causing the problem, did all the investigation and provided the fix, then waited patiently while nothing happened (except that our program got broken even more by WindowBlinds).

What should we have done? Kept posting here hoping that Stardock would wake up, even though the WindowBlinds developer and Stardock support were already aware of the thread? Just sit back and ignore the fact that people were trying our program and thinking it was broken through no fault of our own?

Be loyal to whoever you want, but all we have done is investigate the problem, provide the solution to someone else's mess, wait patiently and then give people the facts when left with no other option.

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