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The following problems have been with me for a while and nothing I do
will make them go away:

(a) The keyboard stiffs regularly while editing text. But the mouse
keeps working so one can save what was being worked on. It
requires a complete exit from VARPC and a restart of same. (The
Mac itself continues happily all the while.)

Reporter shows nothing when this happens.

(b) Occasionally a complete freeze up of the whole VARPC which leads
to a loss of whatever was being worked on. Restart as in (a).

(c) Just recently a problem has got worse of large e-mails getting
lost between POPstar and MessengerPro. So I moved to MPro on the
Mac which has similarities but a few too many differences to that
on RISC OS. (A benefit of doing e-mails on the Mac is that I get fewer stiffs of
the VARPC keyboard.)

(d) Hermes, instead of POPstar, locks up VARPC regularly and is quite
unusable. I reported this on the Hermes mailing list but noone could account
for it.

I can't offer much assistance with (b) or (c) as I don't use RISC OS for e-mail. I do know that a number of VRPC for the Mac users do use RISC OS for e-mail and haven't reported any problems. So this might be something specific (I assume you downloaded the updated Internet plugin from the downloads section of our website?)

With regard to (a) I have looked through and some changes were made to the keyboard handler with regard to a race state. E-mail me directly and I will give you something to test to see if the problem is better.

Hello Aaron,

I too regularly get a either a partial freeze (keyboard stiffs but mouse works) where I can at least click close and save in the application I'm using and then close the emulation; or a complete freeze of the emulation (neither keyboard nor mouse works) and have to resort to Window mode and closing it via OSX and losing anything since the last save. If the former happens (mouse still works) then when you close the emulation through the task manager shutdown, when you click on 'Off' or any button in the dialogue box, then it totally freezes and I have to use Window mode and close the emulation from OSX. A few times, in the middle of working the emulation simply exits and you find yourself back in OSX and you will get the 'Application suddenly quit error' appear, but this is much less often.

I also get a problem with an uncontrollable cursor as if you have got a key stuck down, but sometimes it actually inserts the same character over and over, sometimes it is nothing (or a space?) as it is just the cursor moving forward, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. If you try to save the file you were working on, when the dialogue box appears the uncontrolled cursor starts adding characters in the dialogue box, altering any name there so even if you save instantly, the name is now the original plus numerous added characters!

It happens with both my computers (Mac Mini Intel processor, running OSX 10.5.6 and the iBook PPC processor, running OSX 10.4.11) and it never affects the Mac/OSX so it does seem to be an application fault. I have tried things like trying to isolate which software is loaded in case it is one particular application, but it doesn't seem to be any particular software. It can freeze when only using !Edit or !FireWorkz Pro or !Ovation Pro which are my main applications, with nothing else loaded after a clean boot.

I did report this to you some time ago, but as nothing has changed I am living with it, and doing very regular saves when working. It would be nice to have an end to this problem though, as it is the only thing now I find annoying about the application.

Roy