Sustain Focus - Bug?
 

Greetings,

I just purchased a rating 3 sustaining focus for the mage in our group. It throws a validation error of "you must choose an option", When I click the edit this gear button of the focus I am presented with adding commlink modifications and programs.

Thanks

I just noticed the issue. In creation mode the choice drop down box is presented to pick the category for the focus, in advancement mode it is not.

There was another post about buying foci and fetishes after creation mode is locked.

With either one of these, and in fact with most items to be purchased in game, do not hit the "Add and Close" button.

1. Click the "Add New ______" button.
2. Click the item you wish to purchase. [This enables the "Customize" button.]
3. Adjust the rating to the desired rating. [Lower right side of window, use the arrow buttons.*]
4. Click the "Customize" button to bring up the customization box.
5. Make adjustments here as you would during creation mode. [!!Do not use the rating adjustment in this box!!*]
6. Click "Add" Button in the Customization Box.
7. Click "Close" Button in the Add New _____ Window.

If you did not bind the focus during purchase, click on the edit item button & make the change there. Be sure to have the required amount of Karma available to complete the action.

* So far the rating adjustment has proven to be stable in root installs of Win7, XP and Vista, but has caused one crash of the software and Windows Explorer, and 4 failures to record the customization of the item, on our laptop that was upgraded from XP home to Win7 home. So far this appears to be a problem in Windows and not HL. In the case of the 4 failures to record changes, HL ran much slower than it did prior to the item purchase, as did several native windows apps that utilize Windows Explorer for their functionality. This required a reboot of the machine to clear the issue. Once the machine was restarted, removal of the item could be done by selling it for full price. However, those that were bound at time of purchase required a separate Karma adjustment to be made in the advancements tab to recover the karma lost to the failed item.

Thanks CeaDawg, I never would have figured that out.

Hi CeaDawg,

Can you expand on this problem? Are you saying that changing the rating of gear in a certain way causes problems on Windows? This isn't something we've seen before - can you give me a set of steps to reproduce the issue?

Thanks.

Same steps that I presented in that post, only time that it is happening is on a laptop from HP with an Intel processor that originally had Win XP home edition mounted on it and was upgraded to Win 7 home. The condition did not occur on that machine until after the upgrade to Win 7. All OEM or root installs of XP, Vista, & Win 7 are not showing this problem. I've seen this issue with some other applications besides HL on this machine and others that have used an upgrade disc or install instead of wiping the the machine and doing a full install of the OS. Reinstalling the application does not clear up the problem, which is what leads me to believe it is a problem with the windows upgrade and not your application. Microsoft's solution to this when I had this problem with Paintshop Pro was to have me buy a full install version of the OS, so they are aware of the issue and do not care to resolve it. In examining the differences in the content on the upgraded drive and a full install on the drive, the upgrade leaves a boat load of orphaned dll files and handlers associated with windows explorer that are nolonger used, as well as calls to a great many more dlls and extensions in the registry that are phantoms. As best as I can tell the problem lies somewhere within these phantoms within the registry and the orphaned dll files.

There's a reason that 99.99% of techs install an OS fresh instead of upgrading - the process breaks things. Doubly-so when you have as many changes as there were between WinXP and Win7.

Yeah, it sounds like there's an issue with your machine as a whole - not something we can solve in Hero Lab. Sorry :(