After some time, computer goes to switch user screen, causing US to crash

[smjjames]

I wish I had more room in that subject box. Anyways, this is something that I don't think has happened before with US and doesn't happen because while I do have a screensaver that comes on after 30 minutes, I don't have it set to go to switch user or login screen. It's also never done this kind of thing before with anything either. Not having US up seems to work okay.

I don't know why, but after a while, doesn't seem to matter if US is the active window or not and sometimes its sooner and sometimes its later the computer will suddendly go to the switch user login screen or login screen and after I get back, US has a message (windows message, not the in program crash box) saying that something happened with the program and its not responding and continues to CTD.

It only started a few days ago and US has gone quite some time without it doing the wierd thing with the login screen. Not sure if it happened before or after I tried to set the 3D to use Nvidia 3D which caused US to freak out and crash. OR maybe it happened after I uninstalled and reinstalled US? Not sure here.

I know I've been posting alot of bug/error stuff and I'm not complaining in any big way since it can be dealt with and Dan updates pretty regularily, so there may be an incoming patch or something.

I use Windows 7 and graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. I believe there is an update for my vid card, so I'll go and update it on the off chance that it will reboot the vid card or something, wouldn't hurt anyways.

Edit: Wierd, the NVIDIA control panel crashes when I change focus to another window, I'm going to do a clean install, I think something may have gotten messed up because the NVIDIA control panel definetly shouldn't do that.

Edit2: The NVIDIA control panel crash is a separate issue involving the new version, looking into that myself......

Edit3: Now that NVIDIA thing has been dealt with, anybody know whats up with the wierd US thing I'm talking about above?

[smjjames]

Okay, looks like I've avoided/bypassed it by setting the screensaver activation duration to 24 hours. Still, any idea whats up with this bug?

[wy240]

Also got this issue when I fired up US a few days ago. Previously, would run unattended without incident. Will try the screensaver delay trick smjjames used, though my screensaver is currently set to None.

[Dan Dixon]

Switching between screensavers or login screens with a DirectX application often seems  to be a potential source of crashing or lock up (not just with Universe Sandbox).

If this is an issue with the application, Unity should do a much better job of handling this correctly. So look for the new version to probably solve this problem, but no promises.

[wy240]

I should have mentioned that US doesn't actually crash for me in this situation (though it does pause its execution while the screen is locked, which was interfering with long-term simulations). I enabled a screensaver so I could change the delay from 2mins to 600mins, though, the "lock on resume" option was disabled anyway. I set the screensaver back to None, but the 600min delay still works.

Is it possible you slipped in some code to disable screensavers (like VLC media player does while playing), but it's working out backwards for whatever reason?