stevecasper Posted October 15, 2009 Report Share Posted October 15, 2009 I'm cracking open a new topic for this, thanks to Terry. If anyone is still experiencing this rather frequently, can you please try the following for me? Go to Options > Preferences and make sure that "Auto restore the keyboard and mouse hooks" is turned off and then apply your changes. I have a working theory that this might be the cause of the problem and I'd like to test out my theory. Apologies for straying from the main topic, but ... as you've raised the subject of that setting, Chris, are you satisfied with its reliability in general please? About once a day on average I find a regular, stable macro won't activate. Typicaly it's shortkey activated. Yet directly after using Restore Keyboard & Mouse hooks it works OK. I've always had Auto restore the keyboard and mouse hooks enabled. -- Terry, East Grinstead, UK This is splitting from the "Hot Topic": MEP slowing machine down dramatically . I have never had "Auto Restore Hooks" selected, but I've experienced the slow-down described in that thread for a long time. I did, just now, select "Auto Restore" because I've been having issues where some of my macros that are generally very reliable will suddenly stop working until I manually restore the hooks. Based on Chris and Terry's comments quoted above, I'm curious about this function. Should I expect my keyboard hooks to work 100% of the time now? Am I going to still need to restore them manually? Does anybody else have concerns about hooks being dropped? Have I completely missed the boat? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rick Posted October 17, 2009 Report Share Posted October 17, 2009 Does anybody else have concerns about hooks being dropped? I've had to turn on the "Auto Restore" option because the Keyboard Hooks seemed to be dropping. Despite this, I still seem to have a problem with shortkeys. I did write a scheduled macro to run every 10 min to Restore Hooks but disabled it when I found the "Auto" option - may need to renable it if the shortkey problem continues. Reset Hooks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
terrypin Posted October 17, 2009 Report Share Posted October 17, 2009 I've had to turn on the "Auto Restore" option because the Keyboard Hooks seemed to be dropping. Despite this, I still seem to have a problem with shortkeys. I did write a scheduled macro to run every 10 min to Restore Hooks but disabled it when I found the "Auto" option - may need to renable it if the shortkey problem continues. Reset Hooks That's my experience too. Except that I've always had Auto Restore enabled, on the grounds that I couldn't (and still can't) see why I would ever not want these 'hooks' to be working permanently. How could macros be expected to work if these hooks weren't in place? (So I don't really see why it's an option!) I'm hoping Chris will have something to say on these questions. Particularly about why the automatic restore doesn't seem reliable. Edit: This morning none of my shortkey-activated macros would run. Annoying but usually quickly fixed by using Tools > Restore Keyboard & Mouse hooks. But this time that fix failed. Eventually I closed and re-started ME Pro and the shortkeys work again (for now!). FWIW, in case it's related, I was also experiencing very slow text entry. For example, text typed by hotkey-activated macros. This behaviour too was resolved after restarting ME Pro. This may also be appropriate input to the thread 'MEP slowing machine down dramatically.' -- Terry, East Grinstead, UK Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rick Posted October 22, 2009 Report Share Posted October 22, 2009 Shortkeys only work on MEP restart ....... I disabled AutoRestore, and setup my Reset Hooks Macro to run every 5 min. However, my shortkeys still failed. Like you, only restarting MEP seems to fix the problem. No problem with slow text entry tho'. Edit: This morning none of my shortkey-activated macros would run. Annoying but usually quickly fixed by using Tools > Restore Keyboard & Mouse hooks. But this time that fix failed. Eventually I closed and re-started ME Pro and the shortkeys work again (for now!). FWIW, in case it's related, I was also experiencing very slow text entry. For example, text typed by hotkey-activated macros. This behaviour too was resolved after restarting ME Pro. This may also be appropriate input to the thread 'MEP slowing machine down dramatically.' Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
terrypin Posted October 22, 2009 Report Share Posted October 22, 2009 Shortkeys only work on MEP restart ....... I disabled AutoRestore, and setup my Reset Hooks Macro to run every 5 min. However, my shortkeys still failed. Like you, only restarting MEP seems to fix the problem. No problem with slow text entry tho'. My shortkeys are failing so often now that I'm seriously considering reversing the move I made some months ago. I'd been running these reliably with another program (Stiletto, now replaced by PowerPro) for a decade or so. But I decided to rationalise and transfer them to ME Pro. Looks like that was a bad move! I suppose that in total I'd invoke them with Stiletto a few hundred times a day, mainly text strings for posts or emails, plus many for folder navigation. So that's getting on for a million over the years, and I don't recall a failure. So far today in a couple of hours I've had 3 failures with ME Pro. Typing my sig used to be a mindless routine but now I find myself wondering every time if it will work. Here goes ... -- Terry, East Grinstead, UK Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eno Nedlog Posted October 23, 2009 Report Share Posted October 23, 2009 My shortkeys are failing so often now that I'm seriously considering reversing the move I made some months ago. I'd been running these reliably with another program (Stiletto, now replaced by PowerPro) for a decade or so. But I decided to rationalise and transfer them to ME Pro. Looks like that was a bad move! I suppose that in total I'd invoke them with Stiletto a few hundred times a day, mainly text strings for posts or emails, plus many for folder navigation. So that's getting on for a million over the years, and I don't recall a failure. So far today in a couple of hours I've had 3 failures with ME Pro. Typing my sig used to be a mindless routine but now I find myself wondering every time if it will work. Here goes ... -- Terry, East Grinstead, UK I have been getting the dreaded slowing and use a lot of shortkeys, it got so annoying I now use Direct Access which I have found very fast for most shortkeys. I also use AutoHotkey where I need more control over a macro, which I call from Direct Access through a hot key. Why I mention this is that if Macro Express Pro was stable I could do everything I want just with Macro Express Pro. This slowing down and near locking of the computer (even when no macros are running) and the losing of hooks needs to be sorted fast. I have tried all combinations of running programs with still the problems. Macro Express Pro has the makings of one of the best macro programs around, so please Insight Software please sort it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
terrypin Posted October 23, 2009 Report Share Posted October 23, 2009 Direct Access looks interesting. I've installed the 21-day trial. Meanwhile I'm restoring my shortkey macros to Stiletto until ISS get to the root of this unreliability issue. -- Terry, East Grinstead, UK Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rick Posted October 26, 2009 Report Share Posted October 26, 2009 Update on 5 minutely Reset Hooks Macro .... Shortkeys only work on MEP restart .......I disabled AutoRestore, and setup my Reset Hooks Macro to run every 5 min. However, my shortkeys still failed. Like you, only restarting MEP seems to fix the problem. No problem with slow text entry tho'. This seems to be working lately.I haven't had to restart MEP. Perhaps, it's not compatible with the Auto Restore option being on at the same time? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beastro Posted January 31, 2010 Report Share Posted January 31, 2010 Hi, I still have to restore keyboard hooks every few hours. Has this problem ever be solved? It never appeared to be a problem in ME3. Sincerely Berthold Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cory Posted February 1, 2010 Report Share Posted February 1, 2010 I don't know if you caught my post in the other thread but... ............................................................................. I had a few users experiencing that slow down and a few of my own machines in an earlier version. First off the newer versions seem to not have the problem. But while we were on the older version I disabled the clipboard hook and the problem completely went away in all cases. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beastro Posted February 1, 2010 Report Share Posted February 1, 2010 I don't know if you caught my post in the other thread but................................................................................ I had a few users experiencing that slow down and a few of my own machines in an earlier version. First off the newer versions seem to not have the problem. But while we were on the older version I disabled the clipboard hook and the problem completely went away in all cases. Yes, I read your post and disabled the clipboard hook and still have to restore keyboard hooks continuously. It work absolutely perfectly until I upgraded to MEpro from ME standard. Now certain keyboard hooks don't work at all whenever I execute them for the first time. They only work at the second intent. I am considering going back to ME standard, as this is really annoying. Example: Shortkey: > Macro: >sz = ß never works the first time I type it. Regards Berthold Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cory Posted February 1, 2010 Report Share Posted February 1, 2010 What version are you running? ............................................ You might try booting into safe mode and closing all other apps and test. Personally I believe this behavior is caused by conflicts with other applications or malware infections. I have MEP on several clients from Windows 2000 to W7 and none of them have these problems so at least I can say that what you are experiencing doesn't happen in all cases. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beastro Posted February 5, 2010 Report Share Posted February 5, 2010 What version are you running?............................................ You might try booting into safe mode and closing all other apps and test. Personally I believe this behavior is caused by conflicts with other applications or malware infections. I have MEP on several clients from Windows 2000 to W7 and none of them have these problems so at least I can say that what you are experiencing doesn't happen in all cases. 4.1.5.1 I am very sure my system is clean and it also is the same on my other PC. There was absolutely no problem with ME 3 on the same machines. Berthold Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acantor Posted February 5, 2010 Report Share Posted February 5, 2010 I updated one of my clients to Macro Express Professional -- it was for me really, as the added functionality makes my life simpler -- but after a couple of weeks, the macros proved to be so unreliable that she asked me to revert back to to the old version. Almost all of macros were hotkey activated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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