How to prevent 'Hard Flicker' present in Access databases

[kalbrecht1972_hotmail_com]

Thought I would post to this group:

I have had a number of mdb's go into a state similar to non-responding, but
they do not show not -responding in the task manager. THe display gets a
'Flicker' to the screen, making ANY action usless. I thought maybe it was
not recouping resources, so I always made sure I closed objects & set them to
nothing, but with no better results. The only recourse is to End the
process/task. Anybody have this happen/Come up with a solution? - Thanks

 

[Marshall Barton]

I have had a number of mdb's go into a state similar to non-responding, but
they do not show not -responding in the task manager. THe display gets a
'Flicker' to the screen, making ANY action usless. I thought maybe it was
not recouping resources, so I always made sure I closed objects & set them to
nothing, but with no better results. The only recourse is to End the
process/task. Anybody have this happen/Come up with a solution?

The only time I've seen that kind of thing is when I did
something that caused the current record to change and had
some code somewhere that changed it back to a different
record, which triggered the original record change ad
infinitum.

Doing something like having a Me.Requery in the form's
Current event along with setting a Bookmark or some such.

I suppose it might be possible to get into an infinte
"Calculating" loop by having a strange combination of
control source expressions too.

If the problem is occurring because of something you are
doing in some VBA code, try hitting Ctrl+Break to stop the
code.

 

[kalbrecht1972_hotmail_com]

Thanks for the reply Marshall -

When the application gets to this state, a <ctrl><break> does nothing!

 

[Marshall Barton]

Have you checked for any code that may be triggering a
processing loop?

Do you have any other clues that might provide a hint as to
what's happening?

You may need to add some Debug.Print lines to a few critical
event procedure to see if you can track whatever processing
is going on. Try the form's Load, Current and AfterUpdate
events to start with.

 

[kalbrecht1972_hotmail_com]

Marsh -

This is a hard one to debug. It is not consistenly reproducible. I feel it
coincides with memory, because the problem will NOT appear, if Access keeps
the focus. The same code/form will enter into this 'Flicker' state if a user
initiates some action, whether it be opening the application, or running a
report, AND THEN switches focus to another (MS or other) application to do
work while the Access app processes.

Currently, I have insufficient rights to increase the paging file on my
machine. I have submitted a request to have this right, and will test this
once given.

Thanks for your response, and helping me try to figure this one out!

 

[Marshall Barton]

That sounds really nasty. You have my sympathy and best
wishes for a clear and speedy resolution.

 

[kalbrecht1972_hotmail_com]

Marshall & All -

I am still struggling with this issue, but I thought I would give additional
detail. Like I said, this issue (it seems), is most apparent, if the focus
switches to another application while Access is processing a large amount of
code. Both DAO & ADO are being used, but an empesis of DAO.

One of the 'Symptoms' of this 'State', is as follows:

I open the application from an icon.
WHile the application is loading, I switch to Outlook.
Switch back to the app, after I judge that the app has finished loading.
The opening form, which is opened by a function, triggered by an autoexec,
appears to not correctly 'Painted' on the screen. The top border is not
present, and the command buttons are non-functioning.
I exit the application, by clicking the 'X' in the top right corner of the
Access program.
After a slight pause, the flicker happens, and the only recourse is the
<ctrl><alt><Del>.
<ctrl><Break> does nothing.

I also have had this state happen when iterating through a TableDef
collection, AND it prompted a VISIBLE error. 'Ilegal DLL call'. Immeadiatly
after this error, the flicker state became present. COuld it be related to
DAO???

Thanks for listening.

That sounds really nasty. You have my sympathy and best
wishes for a clear and speedy resolution.
--
Marsh
MVP [MS Access]

This is a hard one to debug. It is not consistenly reproducible. I feel it
coincides with memory, because the problem will NOT appear, if Access keeps
the focus. The same code/form will enter into this 'Flicker' state if a user
initiates some action, whether it be opening the application, or running a
report, AND THEN switches focus to another (MS or other) application to do
work while the Access app processes.

Currently, I have insufficient rights to increase the paging file on my
machine. I have submitted a request to have this right, and will test this
once given.

Thanks for your response, and helping me try to figure this one out!