Refering to controls by ID points to a "ghost" control

[ssands]

I have been a long time user of AutoIt.  I use it to drive automation on a third party piece of software by sending mouse commands, keystrokes and manipulating controls.

I have been running into the following problem more and more frequently:

I use AutoIt v3 Window Info tool to identify a control that I would like to manipulate but when i run a script using the acquired ID of the control, it points to a "ghost" control and it therefore cannot act on the correct control.

Example: I have written a script that, given a control ID, draws a border around the control that belongs to that ID.  Let’s say I have a button on a third party piece of software I wish to access.  I use the Window Info tool, get the control ID for the button and pass it to my script.  Instead of drawing the border around the expected button, it draws a border around a seemingly unique location on the window and often not even the same size or shape as the button.  Needless to say, any command I pass to the button control using this ID, gets sent instead to this "ghost" control.

Sometimes, the software developer will create two controls with the same ID.  This explains this issue well enough and eliminating duplicate IDs often solves those problems.  However, I am seeing this more and more with controls that do not have duplicate IDs.

Any help will be mostly appreciated.