Death by a thousand windows

March 10, 2008 10:33 PM

I have a very specific problem with the online system at my work.

I have a contracting job that requires me to log on to my work's online system (through Internet Explorer) and listen to audio clips. I work from home.

The system was first developed for essays, but 2 years ago it was adapted to play audio. It is clearly inefficient with system resources. But I thought I'd ask about this problem, since it does really cut into my efficiency.

Many of my colleagues (maybe 5%) have the same problem I do:

When going between audio clips, a small Internet Explorer window appears in the bottom right of the screen. It usually just flashes and goes away. Sometimes, however, it stays permanently - so much so that I can't even close it (not by using task manager; not by right-clicking and choosing "close").

These windows really cripple my computer. Usually after I get two of these, the audio will just not load on my computer. Additionally, I can't open up other programs - or if I can, they open up very limited. Windows notepad, for example, will sometimes open, but the menus at the top will not load.

The system uses Java - although it doesn't work very well in versions of java past 1.50-11. Additionally, the system requires use of the *.ogg patch.

I've developed a weird solution that helps. My solution has been to open up about 25 internet explorer windows and log on to the system with one of them. Whenever I get a freeze (one of those little windows freezes) I close one of the IE windows and it seems to free up system resources for a while. This allows me to work much longer, because without those other windows, I reach a point - within a half hour - where I have no memory left to load any of the audio.

When I run out of IE windows (and this often means I'll have about 8 frozen little windows that refuse to close) I restart my computer. I usually have to do this about once every 8 hour shift.

Question: Is there anything I can do on my end to avoid this problem? As I said, some of my colleagues do not have this problem. I have Windows XP, running on a Lenovo Thinkpad T60. This problem has been with me since the beginning (2 years ago) and my computer has undergone many changes. I have a great deal of free hard drive space, and generally keep very few programs running (I've got a very clean computer). I've tried different upgrades of IE and many different versions of java, and of course my company has tried a variety of things. The general policy with tech support is not to be concerned about this.

That said, my company isn't Metafilter. Maybe you ragtag group of misfits have an idea.

posted by mammary16 to computers & internet (13 comments total)

Do you have to use IE?
posted by kindall at 10:40 PM on March 10

Any chance you could try Firefox with the User Agent Switcher plugin?
posted by jjb at 10:47 PM on March 10

Yes, it doesn't work in Firefox. I try to load it in Firefox, and an error message immediately pops up - "You must use Internet Explorer Version 5.5 or higher."
posted by mammary16 at 10:47 PM on March 10

Any chance you could try Firefox with the User Agent Switcher plugin?

Interesting - I gave it a try, set Firefox to IE, and it got me a bit farther into the login process, but then I initially got the error message (sometime to this effect) "You cannot use the Netscape Navigator version of Java for this system, please install the Internet Explorer version."

And now when I try again, it brings me to the login without an error - but when I try to enter, the window freezes and wherever I try to type it types backwards. Weird.

Thank you for the suggestion, however! :)
posted by mammary16 at 10:56 PM on March 10

There is also Opera if you want to try alternate browsers. Opera does user-agent faking pretty well. Safari is another option now too. But it looks like it needs the very old Microsoft Java VM that any new browser won't support. What a nightmare.

Here's a few more random ideas though I suspect they won't help either.

Have you tried running the software as another user on your machine? When it bogs down, just log out of that user account then log back in.

Under folder options, there is an option to launch folder windows in a new process. This is for for explorer rather than IE but it might work for IE too. If it does, it should be easier to kill a wayward IE without rebooting the entire system.

Another option is to run another windows process under VMware and do all your work there. When it keels over you'd only need to restart the VM rather than the entire machine. This isn't much better though.

I hope someone has better suggestions. This sounds awful for you.
posted by chairface at 11:48 PM on March 10

Have you noticed any pattern on when the window freezes? Is it with larger audio files perhaps? Or during a temporary network disconnect?

Are the windows that freeze frozen in all regards? I assume then it isn't possible to view the source code from them to gather any other clues.

Do you know if you are using the same version of Java and Internet Explorer as the other 5% with the problem?
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 12:34 AM on March 11

Contact some of those people who run it just fine and see how their setup differs from yours. I would guess they are running an old version of IE, and I'm sure you could dig that up somewhere. Other than that, it's just coded poorly. There probably isn't a whole lot you can do about it short of fixing the code, which could range from simple to horrendous.
posted by sophist at 2:34 AM on March 11

Also, try looking in the process window (Alt-Ctr-Del -> Process Tab) and see if you can identify the process there. You say you cannot close the window manually, but you can probably identify the process that is running it and terminate that. Ignore the apocalyptic warnings Windows gives about process termination, even if you kill something important its nothing a restart won't fix.
posted by sophist at 2:43 AM on March 11

The message about using the Internet Explorer version of Java makes me think they may have developed this to use the old Microsoft "Java" Virtual Machine. Microsoft was forced to stop including that with Windows when Sun sued them (they were pretty much "poisoning the well" by including proprietary extensions to Java). You can still find it online for testing if you look for msjavx86.exe.
posted by JaredSeth at 3:11 AM on March 11

By the way, I don't actually recommend installation of the old Microsoft Java VM...it's been discontinued for a few years now and likely has unresolved security issues. I'm only suggesting it so you can determine if the root of your problem is that the site is optimized for it's use, since it was included with earlier versions of XP.
posted by JaredSeth at 3:38 AM on March 11

It might just be possible to ferret out the URL of the ogg file the java applet is playing and simply download that directly, provided they're not doing some silly java-only streaming thing. There isn't a simple way to do this unfortunately, but if you buy a networking geek a beer he or she can probably load up wireshark and see what's going on on the wire.

Something that might work in the meantime is setting up a VMware virtual machine with XP installed and doing the audio part of your job in there. It'll be far too slow to actually use for normal work but you should be able to listen to the audio with it and reboot just the virtual machine when it locks up without taking your entire machine down. Plus you won't contaminate your real operating system with that horrid MS Java VM.
posted by Skorgu at 5:06 AM on March 11

Oh and to ascertain whether or not the MSJVM had anything to do with it, look in C:\Windows\inf for a java.pnf file. If you don't have that, you don't have the Microsoft JVM installed. Now go and do the same check on a machine that's not experiencing the problem.
posted by JaredSeth at 6:18 AM on March 11

Thank you everybody for your suggestions - nothing has worked, unfortunately, but I appreciate the effort.

I'm going to try setting up a VMware virtual machine (per your suggestions).
posted by mammary16 at 4:04 PM on March 11