WARNING! 'Colorfull' theme crashes NextSTART!
Saturday, October 12, 2002 by JcRabbit | Discussion: WinCustomize Talk
WARNING! The 'Colorfull' theme WILL crash NextSTART if you use it!
We think the author bypassed the validation procedures in NextSTART's Preferences GUI and hand-edited the configuration settings directly, entering a couple of out-of-range values in the process.
Hand-editing NextSTART or WorkShelf configuration files is akin to hacking the Windows Registry directly: enter the wrong value and you can crash Windows hard, possibly being forced to re-install. Furthermore, and unlike Windows, there really is NO advantage in hand-editing NextSTART or WorkShelf configuration files: the GUI Preference screens list ALL the available settings PLUS they properly validate them. This problem would not have happened had the theme author sticked to this simple guideline.
If you are unable to run NextSTART after installing the 'Colorfull' theme, open the Windows Registry Editor and navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WinSTEP2000\NextSTART
Look for the ButtonColor and ButtonColor2 entries and set their values to 0.
If the 'Multi-User Aware' setting in NextSTART is enabled, please look under HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead.
To fix the theme itself, you will have to change those values in the theme configuration file (Colorfull.wst) as well.
Jorge Coelho
NextSTART 3.0 - A user interface you can actually use!
http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies
IRC Chat: #winstep on AustNet
We think the author bypassed the validation procedures in NextSTART's Preferences GUI and hand-edited the configuration settings directly, entering a couple of out-of-range values in the process.
Hand-editing NextSTART or WorkShelf configuration files is akin to hacking the Windows Registry directly: enter the wrong value and you can crash Windows hard, possibly being forced to re-install. Furthermore, and unlike Windows, there really is NO advantage in hand-editing NextSTART or WorkShelf configuration files: the GUI Preference screens list ALL the available settings PLUS they properly validate them. This problem would not have happened had the theme author sticked to this simple guideline.
If you are unable to run NextSTART after installing the 'Colorfull' theme, open the Windows Registry Editor and navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WinSTEP2000\NextSTART
Look for the ButtonColor and ButtonColor2 entries and set their values to 0.
If the 'Multi-User Aware' setting in NextSTART is enabled, please look under HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead.
To fix the theme itself, you will have to change those values in the theme configuration file (Colorfull.wst) as well.
Jorge Coelho
NextSTART 3.0 - A user interface you can actually use!
http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies
IRC Chat: #winstep on AustNet
JcRabbit
Reply #2 Saturday, October 12, 2002 11:05 AM
Reply #2 Saturday, October 12, 2002 11:05 AM
Thanks Jafo! 
It's a shame we only identified the problem theme now (after it getting more than one thousand downloads), but it took that long for reports to start showing up at [email protected]
This theme could actually prevent users from running NextSTART if they had hotspots set to auto-activate on startup: NextSTART would attempt to display the associated menu(s) and immediately crash.
Jorge Coelho
NextSTART 3.0 - A user interface you can actually use!
http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies
IRC Chat: #winstep on AustNet
It's a shame we only identified the problem theme now (after it getting more than one thousand downloads), but it took that long for reports to start showing up at [email protected]
This theme could actually prevent users from running NextSTART if they had hotspots set to auto-activate on startup: NextSTART would attempt to display the associated menu(s) and immediately crash.
Jorge Coelho
NextSTART 3.0 - A user interface you can actually use!
http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies
IRC Chat: #winstep on AustNet
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Reply #1 Saturday, October 12, 2002 10:42 AM