I just a few days ago upgraded my computer to WinXP, and it’s starting to bug me. I did have WinME, no way in heck am I going back to that pile of crap…um. Yes. My question.
Every time I am reading the internet and AOL Instant Messenger is on, somebody naturally talks to me. Every time that occurs, and the AIM window is not my active one, the taskbar will pop up and flash orange and silver at me until I click on the AIM window. I don’t want to click. I know that the person IMd me due to having the visible part of the IMBox flash dark and light repeatedly.
TweakUI nor the taskbar’s Properties lets me tell it that I want it to lie down and stay hidden. Is there anything I can do to make it a good taskbar?
Not sure about XP, but this is how it works for W9x and NT4:
Under the registry key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Create DWORD values named ‘ForegroundLockTimeout’ and ‘ForegroundFlashCount’, and set them for the desired behaviour.
The first value controls the time a waiting application waits before taking focus ( 0 = immediate).
The second value is the number of times to flash the taskbar icon (0 = infinite).
[sub]And the obligitory:
“Modifying your registry may cause orbital misalignment, widespread crop failure, and chronic wailing and gnashing of teeth”[/sub]
Okay…this is easy enough. ForegroundFlashCount and ForegroundLockTimeout both were already there, so I just fiddled at them.
…They do nothing, or something. FLT doesn’t do any good, FFC shouldn’t be infinite, but just…0. Never flash, never pop up. I set it to 0, no change. Unless I need to reboot for changes to happen? I don’t know, I’ve never edited the registry before…
(there’s another thread around right now asking the same question)
I have the same problem with W2000. This supposed feature drives me nuts. I found the two registry settings mentioned a few weeks ago and diddled with different values but couldn’t get the problem to go away.
Although I have no knowledge of the individual changes, any change to the registry would need a reboot to take effect.
But before changing the registry, even a simple tweak like this one, you might as well take advantage of XP’s roll-back facility, so save your current system status.
Well, already tried it, rebooted, nothin’ happenin’ there. So I set the registry back to how it was (yes, I write down what I do so I can reverse it, yay) and rebooted again. Maybe 'ventually if there is no Windows-Fix to this, somebody’ll make a little downloadable program-type thing that’ll do it. Maybe. I don’t know, I don’t program, but seems like nearly anything would be fixable when it’s small like this.
You can’t really have “never”, but if you make FLT larger, the waiting app should wait longer before grabbing focus (popping up). Try a BigNumber.
And FFC=0 will make the taskbar icon flash forever. The best you can do there is FFC=1 (one flash).
Another possibility is that the application does not conform to Windows “standards” and ignores these values in favor of whatever the coder liked. In that case, I doubt there is anything you can do about it.
Okay, bumping the FLT up to FFFFFF did not work. That’s a big number. When it flashes, I have it set to 1, and it still will pop up and flash a million times…mf. I hope it’s not AIM itself being nasty.
However now my taskbar is being evil in a different way which I cannot tolerate unlike the poppytaskbar, which maybe I’ll get used to eventually. The tray icons and the icons in Start->All Programs are all…big. Same with the little icons like the globe or the lock in the bottom of IE. It started when I messed with the Accessibility Wizard, but no matter what I do in that or in other places, they all stay oversized and pixelly and ugly. I changed nothing in Accessibility Wizard, it said so itself, but then it decided I needed bigger icons for some reason.
I can “fix” it…sort of. If I tell Accessibility Wizard to use small toolbars and small everything, the icons get small. Some are too small, some like the IE ones at the bottom are still too big. Meanwhile the icons on the desktop are perfectly normal. I can’t figure out how to fix this. Bleh. Is this another thing I have to dig in the registry for?
Oh, wait, crap. :o I fixed the icons, nevermind. Still, AIM is doing the flashy thing. I can’t tell if it’s any other programs – no others do that. I guess I’ll have to dig around in the internet for AIM-related things now.