Weird windows behaviour...

[snowblizz]

...well beside them being a bit odd all the time. Since my computer engineer friend isn't at work in front of his computer, or will be tomorrow (he's building a house) I thought I'd throw it out here. MS pushed a lot of funny updates out today. And yeah I installed them . As I'm typing this the only way I can get Firefox to load data is by moving the mouse. Or since this is a laptop the touch screen. Yes, I am completely serious. W. T. F. ? *Anyone* heard of something like that before?

To make clearer, if I click a link nothing happens. At all. Until I run my finger over the touchpad for a bit. There's no lag or anything. I just need to keep running circles with the cursor to make it load up a page. I'm now getting a .Net 4 fix x2 of 19MBs each and hoping that'll help. But seriously. What the h.... how on earth is the touchpad and Firefox even connected... boggles the mind.

Edit:
For added bizzarity (word?) if the Taskmanager is running it performs as expected. If I close the TM it again freezes Firefox unless I move the pad. Weird. Going to restart and pray....

[IBBoard]

It does sounds like something might have updated one of the files that Firefox is using, but I thought most Windows updates were at shutdown anyway.

Was it only Firefox that was like that, or was it all apps? Or maybe all browsers? I've never had anything like that happen or heard of it either. I've had IE refuse to load pages for a while, but that's just because our corporate machines are under-powered for the amount of stuff they install on it!

As you said, it seems odd that mouse input and page loading should be connected in any way. Hopefully the restart helped. All I can think is that it was blocking and waiting for some input, but why it would be waiting for mouse input I don't know.

[snowblizz]

Yeah a restart helped. Even just restarting FF actually. It was decidedly odd though. From my experience Windows Updates are about 50/50 when it comes to needing restart. More or less if it's a running Windows component that needs updating then it needs to restart.

[IBBoard]

Where as openSUSE will install just about anything without a reboot. Even more useful, if you install an update and you're running the app then it pops up a dialog (or has done for some apps) and says "you've installed a package that this app is running - you may need to restart it"

What I'm most used to is my wife trying to shut down her machine and then it having a dozen updates to install at that point. Makes it difficult to turn the power off and stop it slowly racking up the bill on standby :\

[snowblizz]

Yeah, that *is* rather annoying. Though in all fairness it does tell you it's going to do so. At least Vista has a little exclamation mark on the shutdown button when it's going to do a "install-shutdown". Not exactly the paragon of clarity though. You can even close it without applying the updates if you are in an hurry to shut down.
I much prefer to apply updates knowingly though. Which is why they are on a "d/l but I decide when to apply" setting.

The worst I've ever ran into was my professor who never bothered to shut her laptop down, once in a meeting she had maybe 30-40 reminders spamming the computer and she had no idea why it was doing so.

[IBBoard]

I once had the misconceived idea that it would be good to update a works laptop before a meeting and hit the "lots of updates" problem. As for the warning on shutdown - yeah, it does, but a) I don't know if the wife always notices it and b) they still need to be applied at one shutdown or another, which involves waiting around

The worst updates I had recently was getting Windows 7 installed on my wife's new build. We accidentally bought the non-SP1 version, and it took it about five or ten update cycles before it even saw that SP1 was available, then it took another five or so updates after that to get everything! Crazy.

[snowblizz]

HA! I'll raise you one.

My friend has me getting his computer in order. Damn git. "Oh look there's an SP2 (or was that SP1, I forget) for Vista, I'll install that for you". Said and done it all looks nifty and I restart his computer. To find it can't. Absolutely will not restart the system with the new SP. No matter what I try. Took me two days to finally give in and reinstall his computer. Basically his hardware didn't seem compatible with the SP, AFAICT.

And I think the same SP made my computer lock up if you right clicked a harddrive in the Explorer. Or if that was under XP, I'm not sure anymore, I think it may have been.

[IBBoard]

Wow, thats a mess up I know bugs can creep in, but MS seems to do well in the "big ooops" at times. I work in cyber security, and one of the guys (after much trial and error) found that the Slammer worm exploited a vulnerability that didn't exist in SQL Server without any SPs, but was brought in by SP1!