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I want to raise awareness of this problem again, because I've just bought a new printer/scanner and every time I print anything through UniPrint Virtual RPC gets thrown out of full screen mode. So far it hasn't crashed VRPC but its a damned nuisance having to put it back into full screen mode every time after I print a page.
This time I checked for printer status messages being displayed and there was one so I disabled it. However, even with that disabled and there being no other status displays during printing, Virtual RPC still gets thrown out of full screen mode.
There really needs to be a way of preventing VRPC being interrupted as there appears to be an increasing number of Windows applications that interrupt it. What can be done about this?

Very little. The status messages from the printer drivers demand to be opened on top. This will cause VirtualRPC to flip into windowed mode so that the message can be seen. This isn't something that VirtualRPC has a great deal of control about. It's Windows that causes it (well actually the printer drivers).

Whilst it might be possible for VirtualRPC to always stay at the front. This would mean that no "important" popups would appear. So messages about your CPU overheating, Virus's being detected etc wouldn't be seen. That seems far worse to me. You need to go and complain to the supplier of the printer/printer driver and ask how these pointless windows can be completely disabled.

Whilst I completely understand your reasoning, you need to understand the seriousness of the situation. First, you know as well as I do that manufacturers such as Samsung are not going to even acknowledge an email complaining about the behaviour of their driver software, so that is a dead duck. The next issue is that I am loosing a lot of work because of these interruptions. For example, whilst I was typing email I was interrupted and VRPC crashed loosing all that I had typed and all the email filing I had just done. In my experience there is nothing that pops up on top that really matters (ever). I don't care about virus messages, msn logons, and I DEFINITELY don't care about damned printer software "would you like to update me" messages.
I really cannot stress too strongly that this interruption and frequent crashing of VRPC must be stopped. As I said before, more and more things are interrupting VRPC these days. It would be more tolerable if it didn't crash 9 times out of ten.
Please tell me how I can keep VRPC on top (no matter what the potential hazards might be).

Sorry for the delay in replying, I've been doing some experimentation to see if I can reproduce the problem. At the moment I have been unable to

I think that I need to stress that this is not a general problem and very few users have ever suffered from it. It seems to be caused by the pop up windows messing up VRPCs DirectX buffer space. Hence my suggestion about contacting the developer(s) concerned to ask them if there is a way of preventing these popups. Your message seems to indicate that you have not (so far) done this and I really think that it might be worth trying.

VirtualRPC has no control over these popups, it doesn't know what they are (in fact it doesn't know they even exist). I've said before that some popups (temperate, Anti-Virus etc) could be very important.

Anyway, lets see if we can do anything about the problem.

If the machine is running Vista then try updating the graphics card drivers and ensure that the drivers are
Direct X V10 compatable (some aren't).

You could try adding the line

AllwaysOnTop = 1

to the GUI section of the Va.Cfg file. I don't know if this will have any effect. This was a flag that was being worked on some years ago, for VirtualA5000, and may not even be present - but it's worth a try.

If you are running Vista then I suspect that the problem could be fixed by an update to XP.

I'm running XP (and don't ever want Vista as I've had nightmares even trying to do the simplest of things with many of other people's Vista machines - its so secure even the owner with admin privileges can't do anything without a fight).
I've now set AlwaysOnTop = 1 (in the WinUI area) and I'll see how that goes.
I'll try contacting Samsung about message windows but I don't expect to get a reply.
Some pop-ups are OK. For example, Windows Messenger <person> is online, AVG email scanning progress and a few other things show up at the bottom right on top of RISC OS and the go away after a few seconds without any iterruption. But the things that blow VRPC away are the printer progress (even having supposedely turned it off), and (when I had it installed) Babylon 6 adverts (I deinstalled this because not only did it keep interrupting and crashing VRPC but it was mostly unavailable anyway - 53 quid wasted on that rubbish).

I'll try to find a way of reproducing the crashes by devising an AutoIt script that I can send you. When it raises alert messages it can crash VRPC. AutoIt is an excellent free scripting package so you could easily get a copy to run the scripts.

Thanks for your reply.

Time passes in a flash - over a year since the last post!
The problem of being thrown out of full screen mode is still a major issue. It seems to affect only my home VRPC (but that is a crucial machine that runs 24x7 doing lots of work). The VRPC-SA at work never seems to suffer the problem and neither does the laptop.
The problem is now not only associated with printer notification messages (I've minimised them by deinstalling all the software supplied with the printer and installing only the raw drivers), however, it still notifies me when the HP print cartridge ink levels are low (and that sometimes causes VRPC to crash). However, something else is throwing VRPC into the strange minimised window mode and there are no (apparent) pop-up windows on the Windows side. Sometimes this has been very serious, throwing VRPC out every couple of minutes and crashing 50% of the time.
I've now attempted to stop the problem by a) using a program to permanently hide all system tray icons, b) removing all (minimised) running Windows apps except the essential ones that run 24x7. So far this seems to have worked but I won't really know for a few days.

I am sorry that you are still having the problem. If I am reading it correctly, of the three VirtualRPCs that you have only one is suffering from this problem (the SE version on your home PC). None of my machines (2 laptops and 2 desktops) exhibit the problem.

I strongly suspect that somehow the DirectX frame buffer used by VirtualRPC is getting "removed" when the pop up window occurs. This would certainly cause a crash. This is far from a common problem (as I've said previously). Since not all popup windows on this PC cause the problem it seems logical that the "types" of pop-up window are different. I don't know why this PC suffers from the problem and others don't.

I don't believe that this is a general problem with VirtualRPC, or I would have thousands of complaints. I do however have a couple more ideas. Send me a private message (or e-mail me directly) and we can get further towards tracking down the culprit.

Right, this problem has finally been resolved.

It seem that it was Mike's own AutoIt software that was causing the problem. It was this that was crashing VirtualRPC on his machines. This explains why other users were not having the same problem.

I have this problem on my Windows XP machine, with a small box appearing just above the start button, which throws the VA screen out of full screen mode. 80% of the time I can get back in by pressing Alt-Enter twice, but crashes occur for 20% of these events. As I am using the machine as a server for my other Windows 10 laptop (also using VA) this results in dropped contact.

I have read this thread and while thinking it is possibly my Brother printer or AVG Internet Security causing the interrupt I cannot follow from the rest of this thread how to limit the problem on the XP machine (which I use because a vital piece of software I use does not work on later versions and is no longer supported).

I cannot recall this problem happening on my Windows 10 machine.