I think Ive given the wrong impression of what is flickering. Its not the
connector software's tray icon - that is fine, displays the various green,
yellow, red and blue icons fine.
The vista installation is brand new, fully updated and working 100%. The
connector software and server are also both RTM and are clean installations.
I was asked to upgrade my connector software after the September 25th update
to the Home Server, raising it from version 1500.0 to 1500.6.
It was happening before the updated connector software and after. I
uninstalled the whole connector software from Vista and reinstalled it from
the newer stored version in \\SERVER\Software\Home Server Connector
software\setup.exe.
I have now narrowed it down to when the Home Server Connector Tray
application wants to tell me something by way of a popup balloon. If the icon
is set to Always Hide in the taskbar customization menu, then it seems to be
trying to tell me something from being hidden.
Of course, Vista disables any notification balloons that want to show from a
hidden icon, so it cant, and it seems to be causing this "flickering" of the
start orb in return.
Another side effect I noticed of this flickering was that when I tried to
change the icon to Always Show, while the start orb was flickering, the
drop-down menu was also flickering violently, and I found it difficult to
change the setting as it kept "resetting" back to not being selected (that
is, not being "dropped-down"). I had to use the arrow keys to change the
setting.
Lo and behold, as soon as I applied these settings, the icon showed,
displayed its balloon, all flickering ceased, and everything was quite normal.
I have also now changed the setting for the icon back to being "Always
Hide", and the flickering has NOT started again - probably because it doesnt
need to tell me anything.
For info, I got this to happen by manually starting a backup on this
machine, therefore making it tell me "A backup is starting" and the icon
changing to blue on this computer.
**FURTHER**
Despite it only being this machine that the Tray App wants to show a balloon
stating "a backup is starting", I have a Vista Home Premium laptop with the
same version of the connector software installed on. Even though its THIS
machine that is backing up, and therefore no other machines need to be
notified of its status through the tray app, the same symptoms are happening
on the laptop.
If the tray app is hidden on the laptop then the start orb flickers. If its
not hidden, or the task area is expanded, it doesnt flicker. If I leave it
for a minute or two for it to "display" any balloons it might want to, for
whatever reason, no balloons are displayed - I then let the icon hide again,
and the FLICKERING RESUMES.
I can only think that the Home server itself sends out a message to all
computers that a backup on machine X is starting and to display the relevant
balloon. Only the tray app on the machine entitled X will actually display
this message.
The rest of the machines hold this notification and wait for the backup to
finish before getting rid of it - this is only a complete guess as to how it
works, but it would make sense as to why the tray apps may be causing the
flicker.
Hope I'm not barking up the wrong tree, but it seems that its something to
do with the way the tray application tries to display its messages in
balloons to the user.
For now I have set the tray app to be "always show", so I dont get the
flickering, but of course the rest of my family dont want to see this.
Any thoughts anyone?
pasty2k2
