What's up with the latest batch of laptops causing so many problems to 3rd party software?
It probably does not apply to this, but just in case it might: with Winstep apps I recently started having sporadic reports of problems such as the list of running applications not updating in the Nexus dock, the Update Manager and Weather module failing to connect, etc...
After a while I was able to determine that the common denominator to all the users having problems were laptops with Intel/nVidia combo cards. Disabling the Intel card seemed to fix the issue, but this, of course, was in no way ideal.
After some more research I finally figured out what the problem was: for some unknown reason (perhaps a driver issue), an unknown 3rd party DLL signaled an error when sub-classing windows (although the call itself succeeded). This, in case of the Winstep apps, caused the sub-classing operation to abort, which meant no window notifications were ever received and thus causing all the apparently unrelated problems.
For a developer, the worst part in this is that even though this is a bug in a 3rd party component somewhere, it is our application that gets affected and/or crashes - so guess who gets the blame?
