Empty window titles confuse targeting

[Ron]

Okay I see the problems,... :evil: looking into them

[Ron]

And other piece of old code bites the dust. Could you give this executable a try ?

http://www.girder.nl/temp/Girder320bpre2.zip

[MMcM]

I spent some time investigating some odd behavior I have been having off and on. I have also seen reports of similar problems, but never with enough information to go on. The common thread of these is Window not found on some mouse or keyboard command to an application that is definitely running and for which the command usually works.

Hopefully your NT Explorer windows are like mine so I can use them as examples to demonstrate the odd behavior. The key seems to be that some of the windows for the given application have empty title strings.

Right now, explorer.exe is responsible for three windows, which show up in Girder's Target Selector.

Shell_TrayWnd, no name.
ToolbarWindow32, no name.
Progman, Program Manager.


Select the program manager. Adjust the targeting options so that you have Name: Program Manager and Executable: explorer.exe. Now do Find. Oops, it finds the two windows with empty names as well as the one I wanted. At least this is what happens on my system. And I get the same behavior with other applications that have noname windows.

So, turn on Class Name. That cuts down the search. So far so good. But now adjust the class key to be just Prog and turn on Substring matching. (In the case that got me started on this, it was an MFC window, so I needed Afx: as the match.) Find will work sometimes, but if I do Refresh and Find alternately enough times, I eventually get Not found. This seems to be the intermittant case. And once again, it only seems to happen when there are noname windows for the same .exe.

[MMcM]

That seems to fix my problem cases. :) I did not notice anything strange in a little testing, either.