Hotkey Hell
 

I had a really wierd hotkey problem that took me a day to track down. The problem involved running Ason Shell 1.9.1, Directory Opus 8.2.2.2 and Ultra Recall 2.0c together.

I had previously set UR to use Win+Z to activate and, having forgotten this, subsequently assigned that same hotkey in Aston Shell to activate Directory Opus. The results were bizarre to behold.

With any other application focused in XP, hitting PAGEUP would bring Directory Opus forward rather than paging the original application. Like some kind of demonic ALT+TAB function. This was reproducible everytime.

Launching UR, would result in all kinds of "can't find database item" errors after which UR would load. But I was so terrifed of corrupting my data that I closed UR immediately.

I knew it had to be a global hotkey problem, and after sifting through all my system hotkey assignments, I found the duplicated ALT+Z and removed it from both UR and Aston Shell. This fixed it (momentarily).

But instead of removing the hotkey in UR, I inadvertantly set it to the letter "Z" (e.g all the options for shift keys were unchecked but "Z" was enabled). When I did this, typing a "Z" in any application would result in the letter not being entered and Directory Opus to, again, take focus.

Really, really wierd but at least there was a solution and I was able to get rid of all the problems, including the UR database errors (the DB's are OK).

What the heck is up with this?

Now I will rant. I hate the fact that global hot keys are untraceable and can't be verified for conflicts. Is there a utility that does this in Windows??? Hmm, sounds like a shareware utilty project...

Let me know what you need to work this one.

Last edited by maynard on 07-24-2006 at 04:01 PM

First, hot key issues are completely independent of the data access components of Ultra Recall and could never cause database corruption.

Obviously you accidentally created conflicting global hot-key assignments which caused unpredictable behavior. Since we have no idea how global hot-keys are implemented in the other applications, it is hard to understand exactly what was occuring (but Ultra Recall does properly implement global hot keys).

At any rate, if you assign non-conflicting global hotkeys to each application, do they then work appropriately?

Unfortunately given how global hot-keys work, I doubt that a hotkey management utility that could view/manage them...

Hey kevina.

Reassigning the hot keys fixed it. UR works fine.