Bug of the moment 2011-01-01

I use Tordex Wheel in Windows XP to force the mouse wheel to scroll whatever is under the mouse cursor, instead of the currently focused control. This is the behaviour in Mac OS X and, I presume, common Linux desktop environments. Microsoft did change their scroll wheel guidelines for Vista to this behaviour, although I’ve somehow never checked to see whether this behaviour is as universal in Vista and 7 as Tordex Wheel ensures it is in XP.

There are a few side-effects of having a program override the normal scroll wheel behaviour. In IrfanView, you can set scroll wheel set to cycle through images. IrfanView prompts you if you ask to switch image with outstanding changes unsaved:

If you then roll the wheel over the image (not the dialog box) while the dialog box is displayed, you get another one, and another one, and another one:

So far, so good. After a while, though, you’ll observe that the previous dialog box has no title bar:

In fact, as you open more dialog boxes, none of them draw in correctly:

Keep going, and they don’t redraw at all:

No idea what this is about. I know that you can run out of window handles with Windows, and then no windows, dialog boxes or menus open any more until you close some. Here, I can open windows, but they simply don’t work, and no other running programs are affected.

Just one of those little oddities in life. Life would be a whole lot worse without IrfanView and Tordex Wheel though.

Posted 1st January 2011 – Comments and questions?