I really want to drop some cash and pick up Object Desktop, but there seem to be soooo many unresolved bugs in the software. I also don't see any resolutions. With Vista on the horizon I can also imagine the amount of new bugs that will crop up.
I've been trying out the Stardock software for many years and no matter how nice it looks, it's never been stable.
Some examples...
Objectdock v1.3:
- About 75% of the time, at startup, Objectdock crashes and I get a debug dialog window. Not sure if it's relevant, but I've got several dock items linked to network drives.
- Occasionally, Objectdock will stop responding. Icon animation stops working and clicks are ignored.
- If my dock contains the Recycle Bin, and the dock has Lock Dragging enabled, I can't drag icons into the Recycle Bin.
- There is no way to change the sort order of folder items. The default is always alphabetical. Also, the folder icon itself is always at the top of the list.
- There is no way to stop icons from being created underneath a dock. This makes it impossible to reach the icon on the desktop.
WindowFX v3.0:
- Windows Transitions does not work. When a transition is applied, any window that tries to do the transition freezes. Most noticable in the WindowFX configuration pages.
- Window Dragging does not work. When any dragging affect is applied, EXCEPT for "Make windows turn semi transparent", any dragged window freezes. Most noticable in the WindowFX configuration pages.
WindowBlinds v5.0:
- Unable to alter my fonts when a skin is applied. Many of my skins end up putting all my fonts as Tahoma 8pt. This is ugly, and at 1920x1200, insanely small.
- Some skins (currently have Cyclops installed) won't even allow me to go to the Windows Advanced Appearance page so I can try and adjust my font sizes.
- Many skins apply a BOLD font style to their fonts. In Outlook, this makes it impossible to tell which folders have unread mail in them.
- Sometimes, when applying a new skin, I'll get the "Please Wait" message for an abnormally long time, and then just get the Windows Classic skin applied. Usually, after a reboot, the skin works normally.
- I have Microsofts SyncToy installed and scripted to run at every shutdown. Since installing WindowBlinds, SyncToy causes an exception when I shut down. I recieve the same exception when trying to start SyncToy manually. (Exception is "System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException" in SyncToy.exe [3648], an occurs in "mscorlib.dll")
- During shutdown, when the blue "Windows is shutting down" screen is displayed, I hear a Windows notification beep, as though an error message or dialog box has popped up. Of course I can't see it since I'm sitting on the "shutting down" screen. This only started happening after installing WB.
FWIW, my current PC is running Windows XP SP2 on an Opteron 165 CPU. I've got 1 gig of memory and video is an nVidia 7600GT PCIe card using the latest drivers.
