I know that this has been discussed before, but I want to once again describe what happens when I edit large files, or a collection of files.

Everything is generally all right unless I try to filter on a group of segments. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I am not sure why. If I am going to use the filter, I save the file first -- just in case.

I avoid filtering "Translated" segments like the plague.

I forgot today, and used a Dragon command to select the translated segments in the files I was editing. Just after the command came out of my mouth I realised it was a mistake, but it was already too late.

At 12:14, my entire computer locked up. The cursor showed as an hourglass. The cursor did not move in response to the mouse. I could not use Alt-Tab to switch windows. I could not use Ctrl-Shift-Esc to start the Task Manager. Out of desperation (probably does not work in Windows) I tried Ctrl-Alt-Del, but it did nothing. The only thing giving me hope was that the clock on the taskbar was still faithfully updating the time.

So all I could do was wait, or power down my computer, which is an awful thing to contemplate.

At 12:20, the Studio window was accessible again. I tried to click the diskette icon on the window bar to save my files. Studio locked up again, and I thought it might be because Dragon had resumed executing the macro.

At 12:22, I was able to use the mouse, so I tried exiting from Dragon. No problem exiting from Dragon, so it probably was no longer executing the macro. I concluded that Studio froze again at 12:20 simply because I clicked the save icon.

At 12:26, a Studio dialogue showed that Studio had started saving the files.

At 12:42, the save dialogue disappeared and the hourglass no longer appeared when I moved the mouse over the Studio window.

I then tried to close the Studio window, but simply clicking on the menu bar locked the window up again. Studio was unresponsive, the hourglass showed when I moved the mouse over the window.

At 12:51, Studio became responsive again. I tried to close the window again, this time by clicking on the icon in the top left corner of the window, but the window froze again.

At 12:59, Studio became responsive again. I thought I would be sneaky this time and just use Alt-Tab to activate the window and then Ctrl-W to close it.

Unfortunately, just using Alt-Tab to activate the Studio window made Studio unresponsive again.

At 1:01, I used the Task Manager to terminate the Studio process. Just in case, I then did a repair of Studio.

Total time wasted: more than three-quarters of an hour.

I know SDL has no intention of updating the UI, but is it possible to put in timers to gracefully terminate what Studio is doing if it spins its wheels like this?

That way SDL would also have an indication of whether this is a widespread problem, since they would receive an error report. (After all, SDL is not currently receiving any information that anything is wrong, since no error is being tripped.)

I also know that the answer to the above question is most likely "no", but I guess I just wanted to rant a bit about this problem.

Best regards,
Bruce Campbell
ASAP Language Services