Windows 7 says my Autoit GUI is not responding while its busy

[Kovacic]

I created a few applications in autoit to help with deploying new laptops to our company. Just recently, on several of our laptops, while Autoit is running an install using RunWait, windows will dim the autoit application i made and report that it is not responding, even though the application is still installing.

Relevant part of the script:

Global $LocAdobe = "\\MyShare\Installer\!Win7Profiler!\Supporting_Files\Adobe Acrobat 10 Pro Win7 only\setup.exe"

; somewhere far down the script...


GUICtrlSetData($Label1, "Installing Adobe X Pro")
GUICtrlSetFont($Label1, 35, 800, 0, "Arial Narrow")
GUICtrlSetColor($Label1, 0x000000)
GUICtrlSetBkColor($Label1, 0xFFFF00)
RunWait($LocAdobe)
GUICtrlSetData($Label1, "Complete")
GUICtrlSetFont($Label1, 12, 800, 0, "Arial Narrow")
GUICtrlSetColor($Label1, 0x000000)
GUICtrlSetBkColor($Label1, 0x00FF00)

Also note this happens at random with different installers. what is Windows seeing that it thinks the script is no longer responding?

[Bowmore]

I'm no expert on this, but I would say that this is normal behavior especially with a single threaded application like AutoIt. If the application GUI has focus but does not respond in a timely manner to mouse and keyboard messages sent to the application by windows, the windows will report that the application is not responding. This does not necessarily mean that the application has stopped working, just that it is not responding to any user input at the moment.

[Nessie]

Without seeing the entire source is impossible to tell you an answer. Sometime for example a bad loop status can cause this.

Hi!

[Kovacic]

had an idea, I spoke to one of the hardware guys, and they said its only with one particular app, so what I might do is create a simple loop to Run instead of runwait, then do sleep(2000) in a loop until the desktop icon appears for that app. After that MyApp.lnk appears, progress with the script.

After I'm done with these deployment apps, I'm going to make them more universal, then I'll post them on the forum.

They are made to work over the network and do things the Microsoft Deployment Tools can't do.

[jdelaney]

the Run command returns a PID, you can loop until ProcessExists returns false.

[Colyn1337]

In "Windows Internals 6th Edition" by Mark Russinovitch, he delves into how the OS determines if a program is responding. It's a great book and I highly recommend reading it, but you might find this excerpt helpful...

“Running” means the thread is waiting for windowing input; “Not Responding” means the thread isn’t waiting for windowing input (for example, the thread might be running or waiting for I/O or some Windows synchronization object).

Edited March 1, 2013 by Colyn1337