Comment 1 by nvdakor on 2014-09-19 16:41
Hi,
Isn't this a variation on a ticket that was raised a few months ago?

Comment 2 by blindbhavya on 2014-09-20 03:52
I am not sure.
I noticed a potentially useful feature enhancement in JAWS 16 public Beta and thought that it could be implemented in NVDA as well so just created a ticket for it.
Sorry if the same has been discussed before.

Comment 3 by briang1 on 2014-09-20 07:41
The thing is that its not a trivial thing to do. It much depends on what has caused the lock up. At present nvda has a watchdog routine watching for this sort of thing, and trying to recover from it, but often the combined processes of the running software with nvda running in process might have locked up the processor core or whatever, and how do you recover when its locked up in this way? The answer is, very slowly of course.

Comment 4 by jteh on 2014-09-24 03:22
You can already press control+alt+n to restart NVDA in this situation. This way, a user can choose to restart if they believe NVDA has crashed or frozen.

There are several problems with trying to do this automatically. Most notably:

1. The only way to do this reliably is probably to have another process monitoring NVDA. This wastes resources and we have to be careful to manage it cleanly.
2. If whatever cause the freeze also causes NVDA to freeze when it restarts, we could end up in a restart loop.

@jcsteh From #4467 (comment), are you leaning towards closing this ticket as a cantfix or should we let it remain open in case others have ideas?

We've certainly seen cases where things lock up in such a way that control+alt+n doesn't work, possibly because NVDA's key hook started eating all keys (which should never happen but does happen in rare edge cases). I think I've also seen cases where NVDA crashed and a Windows crash dialog appeared and control+alt+n didn't work. The problem is that these things are difficult to reproduce, which makes devising a good solution difficult.

P3 to at least investigate/gather information, though we're pretty light on details at this point.