Troubleshooting tips? -- Experiment gets interrupted

jtpar

Hi all,

I'm running OpenSesame on Windows 7 and I've been having a problem lately where I'm running my experiment full-screen... and pygame gets pushed to the background. It usually looks something like this:

My experiment is still running, and I can get it back by clicking on the pygame window, but obviously I'd like to avoid this behavior entirely... there are no apparent errors within the experiment itself, so I'd guess that some Windows process is cutting in, I just don't know how to figure out which one it is and how I might prevent it from doing so.

I don't have a lot of details to go on, so I certainly don't expect anyone to know what the problem is, but I was wondering if anyone could suggest ways that I might "debug" this problem?

Thanks so much!
Jonathan

sebastiaan

Hi Jonathan,

there are no apparent errors within the experiment itself, so I'd guess that some Windows process is cutting in, I just don't know how to figure out which one it is and how I might prevent it from doing so.

Yes, indeed. Probably not Windows itself, but some application that's running in the background. For example, on our lab computers, there was a citrix client that caused this behavior.

The best approach would be to check which applications are running in the background, and then disable them one by one until the issue goes away. This can be quite painful if you have many background applications, and/ or if the issue doesn't occur very often. But it's the best I can think of.

Cheers!
Sebastiaan