Forums Bug Reports Treebar Right-Click Issue

I've searched around with no luck finding anyone else having a similar problem. I have between 12-16 networks open at a time so I don't know whether it's due to having 50-100 channels open or not. The problem is that I am unable to right-click on the network/channel name and produce a pop-up menu. This happens even when I restart mIRC and it doesn't happen with any other menu (so far) so I am assuming it's not a GDI issue with Vista. Holding down a right click shows the dotted outline around the network or channel. If there is any other information that I can provide you with or any thing else I can do to debug, please let me know.
Thanks,
ex0a

There have been a few posts regarding people that have had various problems when having a relatively large number of networks and/or channels open at one time.
Regretfully I don't recall enough specific information to be able to find and reference those posts, at this time, but I will keep thinking about it, and if I find them again, I will post the references... unless someone else beats me to it, that is.

at some points your windows application runs out of window pointers it's allowed to have... which means that it can't create a new window (each control is a window) for the contextmenu.

there have been several reports now about people reaching that maximum. unfortunately, it's a maximum which is enforced by windows and not mIRC.

Does it still happen if you have few channels (say 5) open? Also, if you rightclick inside the text area of a channel, do you get a menu?

Those are about the * Error creating window errors

@RRX:

a "window" is any control that uses up a HWND resource... popups do just that.

@ex0a:

The way mIRC is designed to use MDI child windows rather than a tab control or some other form of shared window space makes for an app that uses many window resources. This is inherent in the design of mIRC and what makes it a usable program. Fortunately, few people actually reach this limit, though more people have been hitting it lately (I'm not sure why). There is very little to absolutely nothing mIRC can do to resolve an issue like this unless it completely redesigned the UI, making it a lot unlike mIRC. This is not a bug, it's not even a design flaw, it's simply a limitation in what mIRC is capable of imposed by the OS.

Luckily, you can increase the number of resources windows devotes per application through a registry setting. See this microsoft KB article and tell us if it resolves the issue.

Thanks everyone for the replies as I've recently learned that I'm not the only one having this problem so maybe these replies will help someone solve this issue.

@argv0

The link you provided is for Nt/2k/Xp/2k3 and not for Vista, so I figured that I would post this link for anyone that hits this thread searching for this problem (as it's currently #1 in google). http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947246/en-us

I have just modified the proper registry key and after posting this message will restart and test it out and see whether that solved the issue or not. The only thing that worries me that it may not solve the issue is that the treebar was the *only* right click menu having issues, which seems odd to me that it would be a memory issue when my channel and nicklist menus have 4x the amount of content, half of which is created dynamically, and never have given me a problem. I'm going to cross my fingers and hope anyway! I remember having to do something similar in XP before a reinstall but I actually received GDI error messages. Anyway, thanks again to everyone who replied and I will be back in the next day or two to update the status of the registry tweak.

Edit: UPDATE - I was just talking with a friend of mine who was having similar issues and he had done a bit more trial and error on this. I can confirm that both of us only have right-click issues when mirc is on our second monitors. He is having more issues than just the right-click not showing up. Quote from him: "when i move mirc to my other monitor no boxes show up ever on the treebar and anytime i minimize irc or move the window the chats go behind the treebar ... i have to click view treebar disable and enable it everytime i want the windows to go back..."

It seems that this may actually be related to the way the treebar was implimented after all? I'm still going to restart and try out this registry tweak and hopefully that will solve it, and I will return and update this thread.

ex0a

Modifying that registry value didn't have any noticeable effect. Any other ideas on why it would only appear as a problem when mIRC is on the second monitor?