Hello all,

I think this thread - http://forums.loose-screws.com/viewtopic.php?t=2717 - there are many other threads of similar nature - highlights an issue with many of the posts here on this forum pretty well, where someone claims that shell X does not work with application Y, or shell X uses too much memory or CPU or is unstable, application Y crashes because of shell X or vice versa, etc.

Please, before you post on the forums, try isolating the fault first!

We developers try to follow up on most issues we read about on the forums, and then it's a royal pain-in-the-ass to find out that the problem occured when the user had 24 plugins loaded, 10 applications running, window skinning enabled, 64MB of RAM, and running on an unpatched Windows 98 (a slightly exaggerated example, I know, but not that far from reality in some cases).

So what should you do? Well, first, try running the shell with no plugins loaded and no (or at least few) applications running. Does it still use a lot of memory or CPU? Does it increase over time? If not, the logical assumption would be that the shell is not causing the problem. OK, now we know that the shell itself is not the cause, now start loading plugins, one by one. Why? Well, not all developers write equally good code, some plugins are worse than others. Window skinning affects other applications and may sometimes be causing issues, etc. (btw, in case you didn't know already, please note that plugins .dll's are loaded by the shell and are therefore included in the CPU load / memory usage figure for Blackbox.exe in Windows' Task Manager). Still nothing wrong with plugins loaded? Now try launching applications, perhaps with window skinning both enabled and disabled. And so on - you get the idea.

Bottom line: Try isolating the issue before blaming the shell, a plugin, or an application. Sure, it's easier to blame the shell, but doing that just makes us developers spend time on tracking down a bug that doesn't exist - time better spent developing your favourite shell! - not to mention that other people may be wrongfully influenced by it (for example, the thread I linked to above claiming there was a "tremendous bug with videogames" may have caused some people to avoid bbLean even though it wasn't the cause of the issue - CPUIDLE was!!!). After all, we developers do this for free, we don't get paid to do it, so us asking for a little help shouldn't be unreasonable.

Thank you for your cooperation.

BR//Karl -> qwilk