Dead-(see?)-scrollbar, XP-scrollbar...
While many people seem pleased with the UMPC scrollbar utility I released earlier this week, reports continue to trickle in that an unlucky few are not seeing the scrollbar when they run the utility. Ouch! - this is just the kind of inexplicable bug I was concerned might surface, given this utility is neither production quality nor well tested. [Now you also kinda know why an OS like Vista takes a long time to ship - we spend a heck of a lot of time/effort/resources pounding the (pardon my french) cr*p out of it under every possible permutation, combination, situation, and condition, so as to flush out as many issues as possible before it gets into the hands of users like yourself!]. Yeah, I knew Vista well. Vista was a friend of mine. And this scrollbar utility sure ain't no Vista... (In fact what it is, is nothing more than an abandoned internal experiment from ages past that I happened to stumble upon a few months ago and then attempted to overhaul in short snatches of (ha!ha!) ‘spare’ weekend-time... )
Regarding the disappearing scrollbar itself, that's pretty hard to correctly debug without an on-hand repro. In re-inspecting the code, the only culprit that jumped out at me was an uninitialized variable that might be messing up the scrollbar's dimensions. (For the curious: 'uninitialized variables' are often actually initialized with unexpected, random values and usually lead to hard to repro bugs that vary from machine to machine). I have updated the UMPCScrollbar EXE with a fix and reposted it in its original location. If you previously ran into the scrollbar issue on Vista, please download and try again.
Also, for those who asked for an XP verison of the utility, you'll be pleased to learn this too is now available. Click here to download. Hope this works for you.
Hopefully the updated utilities will work well. If not, I may just end up posting the Scrollbar utility source code so folks can fend for investigate further themselves. (Despite our deepest hopes, I unfortunately have very limited capacity to service this utility further…L).
Meanwhile, on the lighter side:
