Mouse lagging... but figured it out!

[TucknDar]

I was having the most annoying problem for about a month, as the mouse pointer had suddenly started to lag sometimes. I had no idea what caused this, but thought that it might be a hardware problem, and something I just had to live with until I either got a new mouse or at least new drivers...

but I started thinking which apps I had installed or which AHK-scripts I had started using recently, but couldn't really figure it. I suspected that Process Tamer was the culprit, but apparently closing it (I had it automatically start with Windows 2k) had no effect, so I had to look elsewhere...

Then, today, I got tired of the lag again, and disabled most of the startup-items (why I didn't do this sooner? Erm, well... I was too stupid, ok?! ) and this had the wanted effect: No more lagging! Ok, so the problem is one of these utilities, eh... Let's test them a few at a time. Ok, I narrowed it down, until only one app was left: Process Tamer!

"Damn, that mouser guy seriously bugged the hell out of me! Arrgh! I'll post an angry bug report in the forum!"

Nah, I never think like that (others do, though, but that's another story, which I shall return to later... well, only kinda.), so I looked through the topics in the PT-forum, but no similar problems. "Guess I've gotta stop using Process Tamer... too bad, cause it's a nice little helper sitting there in the tray."

"Wait a minute, could this problem be related to the replacement shell I'm using, Litestep?" In short, yes. A simple 'Ignore' of the 'litestep.exe' process, and like magic the problem disappeared.

why on earth this lengthy post? I figured others might get the same problem sometime, so there ya go. And as stated earlier, we all see those angry posts sometimes from users who hasn't taken the time to figure problems out themselves, well, it works sometimes. So I even got some morality in there! "Ye who trieth shall prevail."

I can only regret the fact that I didn't figure this out a couple of weeks ago, which some of you guys probably would've, but then again if I'd have gotten help, I wouldn't be feeling so good about my self, would I!?

[mouser]

nice post actually.

so basically litestep.exe was using high cpu resources, and process tamer was taming it, which was having a negative effect on its performance.

which brings up an interesting issue - should i add litesetp to the list of programs that are never tamed?

ps. this would be a good reason to turn on the balloon messages for when programs are being tamed, it would have given you a visual clue that the taming of litestep was the cause of the problem.

[TucknDar]

so basically litestep.exe was using high cpu resources, and process tamer was taming it, which was having a negative effect on its performance.

[snip]

ps. this would be a good reason to turn on the balloon messages for when programs are being tamed, it would have given you a visual clue that the taming of litestep was the cause of the problem.

-mouser (October 12, 2006, 02:56 PM)

That's the strange part, cause Litestep doesn't use high CPU resources, and thus wasn't being tamed. I have balloon messages turned on, but didn't get any notification about litestep.exe. The log obviously says nothing about litestep, either.

I'm beginning to think that there's something else that's fishy, although Process Tamer and LiteStep are certainly involved... I've got no idea what else could do this, but the next step that might help would be to unload/load specific LS-modules 

You may recall that I had a bit of a problem with LaunchBar Commander, docking and LiteStep? That was with an experimental LS-build with docking features (the latest official release doesn't support it.), but LBC didn't dock properly and didn't "release" the docked area even when minimized (or closed? I don't remember). Other dockable apps (Miranda, for instance) docked properly. I'm getting to the point...

... which is that I'm thinking that maybe some of your apps have problems with alternative shells in general or LiteStep specifically? I'm not jumping to conclusions, as this may just as well be something wrong with LS or with my system, but from my no-coder's point of view it could look like some of your code might rely on explorer being the shell OR Litestep NOT being the shell ? Could any other alt-shell users please reply. What do you think?

[mouser]

strange..
well the first thing to see is if setting the process to Ignore really does solve your problem - that would be the biggest clue...

but otherwise i'm not sure what could cause the phenomena..  Process Tamer itself (the tray tool) is such a tiny little thing with no user interface to speak of (the configuration tool is a separate program), so it's really hard to imagine why it would interact with litestep other than by trying to tame it.  (Launch Bar Commander is an entirely different thing because of the docking behaviors).

[TucknDar]

yes, it is a bit far fetched, I suppose. But I definitely don't have the problem now. I've tried deleting the rule, which still doesn't give me problems until I log off and on again. Then the problem is back.


The problem is gone, which is the most important thing to me, but I could try to dig a little deeper and see if I can find anything more out. not tonight, though