Help: "Not Responding" with splash screen on Vista

[Matt]

My app (.NET 2.0) has a very basic splash screen (borderless form) that I
load manually early in app startup. It works fine on XP.

On Vista, the app takes longer to load. In a few moments, the splash
screen is replaced with a blank form of the same size with a title bar,
which reads "<form text property> (Not Responding)". After a few moments
more the app continues normally.

It looks like Vista is impatient with the app load time and decides to
repaint my borderless form with blank content and a title bar that includes
a warning to the user.

This is very ugly. It basically defeats the purpose of the splash screen.

Has anyone else seen this (or similar)? Does anyone have any suggestions
for convincing Vista to be patient and leave the splash screen as is?

Thanks,
Matt

 

[Andreas Johansson]

Hi Matt,

Vista has much lower tolerance for applications that does not respond
quickly to UI updates.

Can it be that you are executing time consuming code in the UI thread that
may cause the form to not be able to update itself in time on Vista? Try to
use a backgroundworker component or thread to execute startup code in to
keep the form responsive.

Best regards,
Andreas

 

[Matt]

Hi Matt,

Vista has much lower tolerance for applications that does not respond
quickly to UI updates.

Can it be that you are executing time consuming code in the UI thread
that may cause the form to not be able to update itself in time on
Vista? Try to use a backgroundworker component or thread to execute
startup code in to keep the form responsive.

Best regards,
Andreas

Yes, my app is single threaded, so all that stuff is running on the UI
thread. Your advice is reasonable, thanks for the suggestion.

Matt