>Michael,
>
>>I had a similar problem which went away when I optimized a piece of code to eliminate superfluous assignments to Image.picture properties.<
>
>I read the link you gave - and tried the solutions - but so far it hasn't helped.
>
>Would you mind telling me the changes you made that actually corrected the behavior?
>
>Mel Cummings


Mel,

My app has a timer that refreshes the appearance of a bunch of image controls and their parent containers, residing in _screen. I was seeing just the sort of flaky hourglass behavior you describe, esp. on slower machines, but even on a fast one, to a lesser degree. The pattern of cases where the problem occurred was strange, indicating that this was not simply a matter of performance.

I decided to try two things: optimize the refresh logic, and issue a no-op mouse operation (a la fast DOEVENTS) after each refresh. As I recall, I tried the mouse operation first, but that didn't fix it. Without concluding the mouse no-op experiments exhaustively, I switched to a quick pass at optimizing the refresh code. I'm just about certain that the change that did the trick was what appeared to be a minor optimization, avoiding loading image.picture if I knew it already contained the file I was about to load. Bingo, the problem went away, even on the slowwwest machine. After this change, the cases that used to exhibit the lingering hourglass now just show a brief hiccup, with the hourglass disappearing as it should.

Later, I noticed the thread I pointed you to, and it rang a bell: there seems to be a bug in loading image controls. Maybe it only manifests itself when a sufficient threshold triggers the hourglass, so there's a relationship to performance, but it's not a simple cause-effect.

In my case, it turned out that simply not performing unnecessary image loadings fixed the problem, but I'm not sure how I would have resolved it if it had been logically necessary to load those images.

Mike