Another Taboo Violation

["N. Sivin" nsivin@xxxxxxxx]

This message was stopped by the mighty "he*p" taboo:

From: Peter Evans 
Subject: Re: Caps locked; and rebooting
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Not a plea for he*p (yet!), more a mumbling out loud. . . .

Memorious readers will recall that I have recently experienced a
Xy-specific CapsLock anomaly. At certain times, when everything else
leads
me to think that CapsLock is off, XyWin (mostly) behaves as if it were
on;
and when everything else leads me to think that it's on, XyWin (mostly)
behaves as if it were off.

I had never experienced this problem in three years or so of using the
program. It then started occurring inexplicably and become more
frequent,
impelling me to write about it. Then several days went by without this
problem occurring even once. Now, however, I know both how to produce
it
and how to fix it.

If I attempt to delete a vertical block [sorry I forget the official
terminology] soon after starting up XyWin, the program will usually lock

up. That is, if I press Alt-F1 for the start of the block and F1 for
the
end [both of these are Xy3 key assignments] and then Shift-F12 [a
Xy4(Win)
key], the cursor will stop blinking, XyWin won't respond, and (if I
press
Ctrl-Alt-Del), Win95 will say that it realizes XyWin isn't responding.

I do of course press Ctrl-Alt-Del and use Win95 to zap XyWin. All other

programs work fine, and there's no CapsLock anomaly. If I restart
XyWin,
there's invariably this CapsLock anomaly. And [thanks, Wolfgang!]
Shift-CapsLock invariably fixes it.

There are various mysteries. Because XyWin is generally very stable
(for
me, anyway), I haven't recently got it to hang other than in an attempt
to
delete a vertical block. I wonder whether the CapsLock anomaly would
greet
a restart after any other problem. I also wonder whether there are
significant bits of XyWin that Win95 doesn't actually zap.

To repeat, this isn't a plea for advice. I post it merely because I
thought it might interest somebody. Comments are welcome, but as I know

how to avoid the problem and how to fix it (even if only messily), I'm
not,
um, suffering.

Incidentally, the reason why I was starting up Xy and then immediately
using it to delete such blocks is that I've recently come to use
http://www.amazon.com as a source of raw materials for reading lists.
Every page of one hundred books (etc.) has a left-hand margin, and at
the
top of this margin is blurb that I want to cut out.

Irrelevantly (I suppose): I've long been moaning about XyWin's
misplacing
of footnotes (in particular, unnecessarily shunting them to the
following
page). Somebody from TTG [sorry I forget his name] kindly posted
specific
advice here. Two or three weeks went by without my needing to print out

anything with footnotes. Then I did. Before looking up that message, I

thought I'd first see how bad a mess XyWin had made when I used my
regular
(inappropriate) settings. No problem at all: whereas it usually got at
least one note per page wrong, now it made not a single mistake.

Perhaps not irrelevantly: among the keywords I'd looked up in Amazon's
database were "zombie" and "voodoo".
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Peter Evans 

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