Comment 1 by jteh on 2012-09-09 08:21
This happens when Windows won't let NVDA's GUI come to the foreground. On Windows Vista and above, this isn't an issue with an installed official copy because apps with the uiAccess privilege can always come to the foreground. However, on XP and all portable/source/non-uiAccess copies, this will break if something else comes to the foreground while NVDA is loading.

One way to solve this might be to do !SetForegroundWindow in-process, but that's pretty ugly and I'm not entirely sure it'll work.

Comment 2 by briang1 on 2012-09-09 16:04
Oh, I can understand how this might affect the welcome screen, but does it really have a memory as you describe that stops much later attempts to bring up parts of the nvda gui including the menus and the termination prompt?

I have been playing with this a bit and for some reason these effects are much reduced in numbers if you put the command for launching nvda into a batch file and launch that from the startup instead. Very odd, though it does delay launching a bit so this might well avoid the culprits.

Comment 3 by jteh (in reply to comment 2) on 2012-09-09 23:32
Replying to briang1:

Oh, I can understand how this might affect the welcome screen, but does it really have a memory as you describe that stops much later attempts to bring up parts of the nvda gui including the menus and the termination prompt?

Yes. If the app doesn't get foreground when it first starts, it will not be allowed to come to the foreground unless you explicitly bring it to the foreground yourself; e.g. by alt+tabbing. Unfortunately, since NVDA doesn't have a main window, you can't alt+tab to it. However, if you, for example, press NVDA+f1 and then alt+tab to the Log Viewer, things will start working again.

From @jcsteh's #2384 (comment), part of this bug affects Windows XP, specific to which issues are no longer addressed by NVDA. However, this does affect all portable/source/non-uiAccess copies too. I doubt that I have ever experienced the reported issue personally with portable copies, but since Jamie seems to be acknowledgeing it, that should be validation enough. Could fixes/solutions to this problem please be discussed and implementation related thoughts/inputs be shared?

This is Windows XP related and I didn' reproduce this on any other OS. However, also on Windows XP it seems to be related to some registry problems rather than NVDA itself. I suggest closing this. @Brian1Gaff you are welcome to open a new issue on Windows 7 or higher.

I've actually experienced this quite a lot in the past, also on Windows 7 and 10. However, it has been some time ago. It doesn't feel really safe to close this just yet.

I didn'T hear any further reports from users on this and I don't know exactly where to start investigating. @Qchristensen do you have any users reporting this issue? If not, let's close it and reopen the discussion if the issue appears again. Personally I think this might occur when a dirty installation is on the system, maybe after down grading to older versions without uninstalling the current version etc. This could have really comprehensive reasons if it occurs and is quite hard to investigate. But anyway, we need more user reports on this containing more details.

I actually did have a user report the NVDA menu not opening recently (first report I've seen in a long time). Impossible to know whether it is related. For my user, the log has:
“DEBUGWARNING - core.main (11:26:20.720):
Slow starting core (5.40 sec) “

and they were running addons as well, so it could have been a combination of a slow computer and misbehaving add-ons or anything. I asked them to try with add-ons disabled and they haven't got back to me - maybe it was an add-on playing up, they fixed it and are happy and haven't let me know. Either way, I'm still inclined to close this, and open a new issue with more information if we get a comprehensive, replicatable issue from someone on it.