Just discovered a HUGE annoyance in Windows 7

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tranglos:
And now for the final nail in the coffin...

What I described above as FARR sometimes losing its launch history after a reboot turns out to be an indicator of a much worse issue. It's not just FARR. I'm seeing other applications that randomly forget all their configuration after the system restarts. It's as if they were freshly installed, though I haven't yet bothered to go and look for the missing config data. In FARR the configuration is in disk files, but two other apps this has happened to use registry. All are fairly new, certainly aware of userdata space; I'm not talking about apps that try to write under Program Files.

My own KeyNote does of course just that (write under Program Files) since I wrote it on Win95 and wasn't exactly aware of what I was doing at the time. So I keep KeyNote installed in c:\MyOwnDamnFolder. If I start KeyNote, move it around the screen (or to the secondary monitor) and close it, it restores its position correctly when restarted. If, however, KeyNote shuts down with the system, then after reboot it opens in the "factory default" position, on the primary screen.

I think both scenarios point to the same issue somewhere. I'll give myself an hour to figure out what's going on, and after that I'll have just enough time to ShadowProtect myself back to XP, where things like these just did not happen, ever.

I shudder to think what other data I might be losing to Windows 7, and also, what's going to happen when I install some really old, and really crucial software, like Delphi 3 or 6. I should have known to wait for SP1 at least.

tranglos:
Is this a clean install of Windows 7 or an upgrade from Vista? I must say I have not noticed any of these remembering settings problems or file writing problem in Win 7 Pro on my laptop and I use it all the time.
-Carol Haynes (January 17, 2010, 05:15 PM)
--- End quote ---

Clean install, yes. There is no upgrade path from XP anyway. The system C drive was wiped clean by the installer. The only "holdover" is my secondary drive where data lives (the drive where Windows thinks the files are not "mine").

Now I'm going to see how well ShadowProtect does its job! I'll see you on the other side, hopefully safe back in XP :)

I've only seen one impressive thing about 7: the bootup speed and how soon the system becomes responsive after logging in. It seems to apply to starting applications as well I had never seen Firefox start so fast, weighed down as it is by tons of extensions, thousands of bookmarks, and months of browsing history. Sometimes, right after a reboot, Firefox would come up within a second or two, max. OTOH, that was only after I uninstalled Kaspersky (a problem I have omitted from this thread, because this is about Windows, not 3rd party apps, it was slowing things down a lot.)

However, one thing to have been impressed about isn't a whole lot, and I am downright scared by the "memory loss" in some apps. That it is completely random makes it worse yet, pretty much impossible to investigate, unless I want to spend a day rebooting.

tranglos:
Two more quickies before I go. I could actually spend the night describing all the inconvincing occurrences I've had with 7 in the last two days :)

You can now "pin" applications to the taskbar - this is supposed to replace the Quick Launch bar, whatever. Obviously no-one at MS has ever seen True Launch Bar, or they would know how to do it right. Anyway, the pinned apps can be activated with Win+digit keys. I actually happen to have Win+1 through Win+7 assigned to folders on TrueLaunchBar, so there was a conflict. Somehow TrueLaunchBar managed to override those assignments, thankfully. But would you believe that when that happened, you could not start the pinned apps by clicking on them, either? Instead, Windows displayed a helpful error message about a missing file. I can't imagine how the pinning had to be implemented for it to fail in response to a mouse click just because the native hotkeys were not available, but it must have been taken some doing! Does Microsoft still hire temps to do most of the coding?

Lastly, one more tiny little crazy thing I once saw. When I installed 7, by default it put the "Language Bar" on the taskbar. Maybe it happens in localized versions only. Anyway, I didn't bother disabling it. Once, right after a reboot, the Language Bar began to dance. All over the taskbar. I'd have to record a video, but to describe it: the language bar is normally located on the right side of the taskbar, to the left of the notification area. Well, when I saw it, it was oscillating between that location and the far-left side od the taskbar, next to the Start button. Jumping from one location to the other about twice a second. Locking and unlocking the taskbar didn't help. My taskbar is double-sized, maybe that caused it, who knows. I had to disable the language bar though control panel. I've just re-enabled it to see if that dancing thing would return, but sadly, no.

Carol Haynes:
Is this a clean install of Windows 7 or an upgrade from Vista? I must say I have not noticed any of these remembering settings problems or file writing problem in Win 7 Pro on my laptop and I use it all the time.
-Carol Haynes (January 17, 2010, 05:15 PM)
--- End quote ---

Clean install, yes. There is no upgrade path from XP anyway. The system C drive was wiped clean by the installer. The only "holdover" is my secondary drive where data lives (the drive where Windows thinks the files are not "mine").
-tranglos (January 17, 2010, 05:38 PM)
--- End quote ---

That's your problem then because permissions aren't consistently copied from one installation to another.

Have you got the same network name for your PC and the same user name and password? If not the permissions on files on your secondary drive will be wrong.

This happens a lot when you try to transfer data from one computer to another and is especially tricky when you are changing OS version too.

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