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This 'rings a bell' but cannot remember what it does etc.

It's shows in 'left click' RISC OS 4 icon on iconbar->Tasks window->Module tasks and sits between 'Display Manager' and 'VProtect'. So far so good.

During my efforts to sort out my 'printing' I noticed some apps running very slowly. Another 15 'Red Squirrel Tools' entries had appeared under VProtect on the list! I deleted them all and things went back to normal. Is that right? Perhaps there is a 'conflict' somewhere?

Any ideas? (especially to stop the added entries).

I don't know what you did to get multiple copies of RSTools running. Certainly have lots of copies running will slow down VirtualRPC.

However RSTools shouldn't have anything to do with printing. Setting up !Printers is covered in the VirtualAcorn User Guide.

I've tracked down a possible culprit.

It's an App by Alan Senior in his excellent book 'Basic Wimp Programming on the Acorn' page 235.

I use it all the time when writing programs. It makes it easy. Hence when I was sorting out my printing ie changing my programs multiple RStools entries appeared. It converts a text file called RunImage (I use !Edit) to a BASIC file called !RunImage. However it does some strange things which I don't understand.

Perhaps someone can work it out and come up with a solution?

By the way what does RSTools do?

OK..er...you do know that Edit can handle and edit BASIC directly and perform the tokenising/detokenising. Make sure the Edit is loaded then simply hold down SHIFT and double click on your BASIC program. Just save in the normal way.

I had 4 Red Squirrel Tools running every time I started VRPC-SA. They were keeping each other very busy resulting in up-to 80% use of the processor time (in the module area). Although animal lovers may object I used to kill 3 of them, not knowing what they were doing anyway. This resulted in Number 4 usually keeping rather quiet.

At the last BigBenClub meeting one of our experts, Kees Grinwis, found that Red Squirrel Tools was loaded every time StartWimp was called. He then introduced in the !Boot.Choices.Boot PreDesktop obey file a line at the end setting an "Alias RSTools_StartWimp" (without the quotes) with the comment: does nothing. In addition he introduced an obey file with "%RSTools_StartWimp" (again without the quotes) in the !Boot.Choices.Boot.Tasks. The result is: only one Red Squirrel and a rather quiet one at that.

Although some people may object to this kind of birth control (and Kees considers it to be a not-very-elegant solution) it solved my problem in population control in the module area.