19 replies to this topic

[rmalcolm]

I have a Presario X1010 US featuring a Synaptic Touchpad with Virtual Scrolling. About 50% of the time when I play a Youtube video or some other embedded videos such as on the BBC News website and select full screen, the Virftual Scrolling feature is disabled and can only be restored by rebooting. I do not use any controls such as pause/play on this expanded screen and only exit using "esc". On one occasion, not only was VS disabled, but the up and down arrows did not work either. I have tried resetting in the Synaptics control panel, no effect. I have tried closing and openning the browser (IE 7), no effect. All patches and updates from MS are installed. I run Avast! AV and ZoneAlarm. Turning these off does not change the problem, as one might expect. I have the latest install of DivX, DirectX, Flash and Java. The laptop came with the 7.5.x driver. I have since tried 7.10.x, 7.12.x from HP as well as two of the 10.x drivers from Synaptics. All of them suffer from the same problem. I contacted tech support at HP and their response was "re-install Windows"! Doesn't sound like they gave it much thought. I tried to find a way to contact Youtube, but they seem to stay below the radar. Anyone have any suggestions? RM

[HFCG]

Hello,
I do not have an answer for you, but I want to say that re-installing Windows is not the correct way to fix this.
Some conflict between the driver, and media files is causing this issue.
There is a fix for media files causing windows explorer to stop working, so there may be a known fix for media files causing the driver to stop working.

This is the fix for media files causing windows explorer to freeze
Windows XP Explorer has a 'feature' to provide a preview in the Details box on the left of the file you have selected, if it’s supported. Image files, HTML pages, video clips, MP3s, etc are all previewed (even with the folder view open).

If you have a large movie clip and it either is corrupt (ie. no index from a partial download) or it uses an unsupported codec, then Explorer tries to load the whole file. This can slow your computer a lot and prevent deleting/renaming/moving/etc the file until it’s finished.

Simply do the following:

• Click Start, then Run, type regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll and click "Ok".
• A window will pop up saying that the file has been unregistered successfully. (If you don't receive this window, or the window gives an error, then please post that in your reply.)
• Reboot your computer and see if the problem persists.

I do not know if this helps you, as this is for a differant issue, the point being that you should not have to re-install.

Edited by HFCG, 15 July 2008 - 07:52 PM.

[rmalcolm]

Thanks for replying HFCG. As you thought, your suggestion did not fix the problem, but it did provide another clue. If I allowed the clip to play to completion, the VS remained. However, if I interrupted the download, as indicated by the progress bar, then VS was killed and a reboot was necessary. Does this provide a clue? Should I reinstall "preview"? If so, could you provide the script to run? RM

[HFCG]

If so, could you provide the script to run?

No, writing script is way over my head.
Instead of rebooting why dont you type in the vs program in run?
That should restart the program.
Do you know how to view event logs?
Please go into the Event Viewer and see what errors occurred at the time you get this error message.
Click START-->RUN and type EVENTVWR.MSC and hit ENTER.
Look under SYSTEMS AND APPLICATIONS for items with RED X's that happened at the SAME time as your problem...List them here.

[rmalcolm]

Hi HFCG; It would appear that my word "script" was inappropriate. What I meant was how do I undo the change made by running "regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll" since this does not seem to have made a difference to the VS problem. I will play with the Event Viewer, which I use quite regularly, to see if I can catch the problem. I had looked there in the past to no avail with respect to this problem. RM

[rmalcolm]

I've been experimenting more with the Virtual Scrolling problem. I find that if I exit youtube from the full screen mode before it finished loading the file, by pressing "esc", the VS continues to work. However, if I press pause then esc, VS is disabled. Event viewer shows no problems under any category as a result of doing this. RM

[HFCG]

Can you tell me when this issue started? There is a conflict with; the synaptic driver and/or the graphics driver/media files [/b]or[/b] you are infected. I am thinking that a driver update may have caused this. Or has it always been so? Do not worry about changing the "regsvr32 /u shmedia.dll" as this is how it is sopposed to be.

Edited by HFCG, 17 July 2008 - 05:20 AM.

[rmalcolm]

Hi; I first became aware of the problem about a year ago. I was given this laptop with a dead graphics board. I installed a new board and the graphics driver was downloaded from the HP site. All the Synaptics drivers were downloaded and installed subsequent to my discovering the problem. I found the earlier versions of them on Drivers.com Should I re-install the graphics driver? Is there a proper way to do this so that if the existing one is corrupt the infection/broken bit is not passed on? I realize that simply deleting the existing driver will probably leave me with no graphics unless MS XP Home provides a generic one. Thanks RM

[HFCG]

there is a generic graphics driver, however, you should be able to update the driver from device manager.

• open control panel
• select system
• select hardware
• select device manager
• right click on your graphics card
• select update driver

device manager will search the Microsoft web site for the best driver.
OR you can go to the manufacture web site and look for a more recent driver.
Updating the driver, or installing a newer driver, does not require you to uninstall the old driver first.
You can do this for the synaptic driver as well.

[rmalcolm]

I had considerable difficulty replacing the graphics driver. The new one from HP would not remove or replace the original one. I finally forced the replacement by manually uninstalling the old driver and then installing the new one to replace the MS supplied generic driver. While this significantly improved the quality of the display, it still did not resolve the Virtual Scrolling problem. If I play youtube or BBC video clips on full screen, if I use any of the video controls such as pause or stop, once I hit "esc" and return to the browser, the VS is disabled and the computer must be rebooted. I tried to restore the VS through the restore button in device manager, but this does not work. RM

[HFCG]

http://www.synaptics...shooting.cfm#p8
The only advice at the obove site is to install new drivers .
Are you using media player to watch these videos?
Some one could have downloaded a video codec that is full of mal-ware, have you checked that?

[rmalcolm]

I do not know what player is used by youtube or the BBC. This computer has Media Player Classic as the default player (and playing clips full screen with it does not cause the problem), QuickTime, Windows Media Player and Real Alternative. Is there a way to discover what player or files are being used during the viewing of a youtube clip? Event viewer does not seem to show this. It might be a way to track down a broken file. RM

[Bret Leduc]

Hi! I am also suffering from this. If you guys find an answer, please let me know! To reiterate, the problem is, the touchpad scrolling feature stops working sometimes after coming out of full screen mode in youtube. Then, just as mysteriously, it will work again after closing the window and reopening. That doesn't always work tho. I am running windows xp on a toshiba satellite model a105-s4334. This problem has been going on for the whole year that I have had this laptop. Please do not answer if you cannot duplicate this problem. Thanks!

[eliot22]

I'm having this problem as well on my HP Pavilion dv6704nr laptop. My synaptics touchpad is updated with the latest driver version 11.0.7 and has had this problem since I purchased the laptop in January.

[ttolk]

I have the same problem. I have a HP (Compaq) nc8430. I've tried both the updated HP drivers as well as the 'generic' drivers from Synaptic. Both have the same problem. Acutally, I didn't know what was causing the problem. I just knew that the touchpad would go out. I thought it was because I hibernate my computer often, but today I was playing with various videos and the touchpad scrolling stopped working. I did a search and found this forum. This sounds like my exact problem.