Reply To: menu items sometimes unavailable in XMetal

[Derek Read]

The following two issues described by dianamost sound related to a known issue that was corrected with the release of 5.5:

+ Clicking the icon to reopen the program does not work.
+ Clicking the .exe to open the program from the program folder does not work.

The problem was caused by XMetaL Author checking to see if there were other instances of XMetaL Author already running at startup (which we've always done). With the 5.1 release the application would send messages to all other currently running apps (via a Windows call) and wait for a response to say “I'm another copy of XMetaL” (in which case the second copy passes control over to the first) or “I'm product whatever” (in which case it will be ignored). In the case where a particular application does not respond XMetaL Author Enterprise 5.1 will wait indefinitely for a response, appearing to be hung in Task Manager and never completing the launch process. Rebooting often corrects this issue, though it may not if one of these other applications starts up at boot time.

The problem does not occur for the vast majority of clients because most applications will respond to such calls.

For clients that must continue to run the 5.1 release (for whatever reason), if your maintenance is current, please contact XMetaL Support for a patched xmetal51.exe binary file that can be dropped into an existing install. This process is manual (no installer is provided). It fixes the particular issue described above (which may or may not be related to the other issues described on this thread).

For those clients that have the option to upgrade to the 5.5 release I would recommend doing that instead.

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