walton@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steve Walton) (07/15/87)
A while back I posted a message about problems plaguing my Amiga which
were a combination of disappearing memory (after a while, it was just
gone) and mysterious crashes when moving icons around. Herewith what
I found out from BIX, PeopleNet, and other sources:
The disappearing memory is a known bug in TxEd and applies to other
programs as well. Apparently, if a program was written for a CLI
startup but can possibly be started from Workbench (doesn't need stdio
windows), it may not ReplyMsg() to its WBenchStartup message. If it
doesn't, its code segment gets "stuck" in memory. Charlie Heath
confirmed on BIX that TxEd 1.3 has this problem and probably other
programs do as well. For example, most of the games on my users'
group's games disks are icons attached to programs which weren't
written with a WorkBench startup in mind. Moral: don't start a
program from WorkBench unless you know for certain that you're allowed
to. To double check, start and exit the program twice from
Workbench--the first time will load libraries and devices the program
needs, and thus the system free memory should be the same before and
after the second invocation.
As for the Workbench crashes, they seem to be due to a small, obscure,
and hard-to-find bug in Workbench. Since I can't make it consistent,
I can't be more helpful than that, other than to report that others
have reported mysterious crashes when doing nothing more complicated
than pushing icons around.
Steve Walton, guest as walton@tybalt.caltech.edu
AMETEK Computer Research Division, ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu
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