Hi! I’m nearing the end of my trial period of VoiceComputer. I’m enjoying learning the program and feel that it’s going to make it much easier to use my computer hands-free once I’ve gotten more adept at using it. In the meantime I have a couple of problems that I need help in solving.
When I open the “Show Main Menu” window and there is not another window open I often get an empty black window that shows the hourglass if I mouse over it. The only way to make it go away is to restart the computer. That’s been going on since I started using the program.
I thought that it might be something called the ghost window so I did the following in an attempt to see if I could clear that up:
-updated the display driver
-restarted Windows Explorer in task manager
-Restarted the graphics driver by pressing Win+ctrl+shift+b
-Removed search bar from taskbar in settings.
-(Just because it was there when the display driver updated) Cumulative update preview Windows 11 V22H2 (KB5030310)
Since I did the above I am finding that when I say “Show Screen Grid” it opens as a tiny, tiny window which I have to maximize. I am no longer able to position the cursor by voice. For instance, if I say “left 10 at 10” the cursor moves to someplace not 10 at 10. Sometimes it hardly moves at all. The screen grid and the cursor were working fine yesterday.
After doing these things I also found that the “Main Menu” window wasn’t positioning to the right as it used to but I was able to find that in the “configure” command and fix it so that’s working fine now.
If you can give me an idea of what I can do to get these other things working again I’d appreciate it.
I can’t duplicate this on my computers but I’ve seen this over the years; fixed it; haven’t seen it in years; but now the bug has cropped up on your computer.
The bug is caused by the fact that VoiceComputer opens a help window, resizes it and resizes the active window so that you can see the help from your working application.
If the desktop is the active application, VoiceComputer shouldn’t try to resize it.
Except, if VoiceComputer can’t determine that the desktop is active, then it tries to resize it and ends up opening up a blank window and resizing it.
So in your case, VoiceComputer probably can’t determine that the desktop is active because you’re using Cumulative update preview Windows 11 V22H2 (KB5030310) and Microsoft must’ve made some changes .
When I get the next update, I’ll test and fix any problems I find.
(Been burned a few times so I never use a beta or preview version of Windows. In fact, I try to wait a few months after a new release so that Microsoft has a chance to fix any major bugs that inevitably crop up.)
In the meanwhile, just open Notepad or other application before you open VoiceComputer’s help.
You should be able to quickly resolve these issues by closing VoiceComputer; searching for “Reconfigure VoiceComputer”; running the app; and restarting VoiceComputer. This will reset VoiceComputer to its default settings.
Ron, thank you for responding to me so quickly. The black window actually preceded the preview update. It began as soon as I started using the program. I’ve been working around it in exactly the manner that you suggested but thought I’d see if there was some way to make it not happen, which there isn’t right now but at least I know what’s causing it.
I reconfigured VC and the screen grid is back to being full-screen again so thanks for that.