Hi Jack,

We are seeing an issue with ATE 7.0.1768.5 where the screen is drawn as a black background after being minimized. The attached video can demonstrate this issue. While I am not exactly sure when this behavior began, it does not seem to happen in 7.0.1764.3. I am happy to provide more info as needed.

Thanks,
John Andreasen
Diversified Data Software

I'm guessing that this has something to do with the recent support for blinking fields, which did complicate the screen repaint operation. But I don't see anything obviously blinking on your screen.

Is it easily repeatable? Every time? Does it only affect restore to maximized? How do you get the display back again? Normalize/re-maximize?

It would sure be helpful to come up with a recipe for reproduce this. I hadn't seen the issue and haven't been able to figure out what the trigger is.

OK, sorry for the lack of detail initially. I was wondering if it might be related to the changes to support blinking fields.

Is it easily repeatable? Seems to be. Every time? At least 9 out of 10 if not every time. Does it only affect restore to maximized? That seems to be the case. If the window is not maximized, it does not seem to occur. How do you get the display back again? I was pressing ESC which triggers our menu to redraw the whole screen. Normalize/re-maximize? I just tried this and it seems to restore the display as well.

It would sure be helpful to come up with a recipe for reproduce this.
I just tried this on a K&K salesman laptop Windows A-Shell instance running 7.0.1768.0, and it is reproduceable in the environment as well. Stephen mentioned that you have a working copy for testing. So, perhaps that might be the best place to start.
Below are steps for reproducing the issue.
Launch window 1 of A-Shell and login to the main menu (maximize if not already maximized.)
Launch window 2 of A-Shell and login to the main menu (maximize if not already maximized.)
Swap back to window 1 and type "OE" <enter> to navigate to a sub-menu.
Minimize window 1. Then, minimize window 2.
Restore window 1 (which should be blank at this point.)

Let me know if that doesn't work or we need to try something else.

Thanks,
John Andreasen
Diversified Data Software

I've tried following the recipe, but the closest I've come to reproducing it is that a couple of times I managed to see the black window for a millisecond before it was repainted. Not sure if that's a clue or not, since the first step in recreating the window display it to blank it out. I may have to add some combination of switches and traces to allow you to back out the recent display changes related to blinking and trace the sequence of events to find the culprit.

OK, sorry it's proving so difficult to track down. Let me know if I can do anything to help.

Here's an update to test which may or may not fix the issue:

ash-7.0.1769.0-w32-upd.zip
ash70notes.txt

If it doesn't fix it, try activating the GUI and XDEBUG traces and then send me or post an excerpt containing the "paint" traces.

OK, thanks. I will give it a try.

This seems to have resolved the issue. Thanks!

Glad to hear that. The fix was pretty simple, just a matter of resetting the internal blink-refresh flag when restoring the window from minimized. I'm still not quite sure why it matters, since when there is blinking, there will be alternating screen refresh calls every second anyway, half of them with the blink-refresh flag on. But my guess was that the blink timer may have been queueing them up, causing complications when the window became visible, but that weren't easily reproducible because of timing complexities with different hardware. Knowing that worked though, I can think of one more bit of streamlining that I'm going to add in 1770.0 (which remains a work in progress related to Stephen's SEGFAULT issue).