Active Field Looses Focus

[John Kamm]

Two clients, (multiple users, similar solutions) have reported this problem beginning a few weeks ago. We have FM 8, 8.5 and 9 users with this solution as well and so far, no report of this problem.

A user will be typing in a field and the cursor will suddenly exit the field; subsequent keystrokes are not entered, no other field is selected. The user must click back into a field to resume entry. It is described as the keyboard freezing or the screen freezing but a click in a field or on a button seems to reestablish focus on the FM window. I don't believe it is a slow screen redraw issue because it can happen in a screen that has been open for a few minutes. There are no scripts on timers or script triggers that are being fired in the background.

Both offices are running FM 10 v3, one is hosted with FM 10 v3, the other with FM Server 10. All workstations are Win XP SP3 and exhibiting this behavior.

I am rolling back one workstation to FM 10 v2 to see if it is version related. Both clients upgraded to v3 some time ago so it seems unlikely that the behavior would appear several weeks after the upgrade. I am wondering if an application like Adobe Reader or Win OS was updated recently affecting FM in some way.

Thoughts?

[John Kamm]

Try this: Open a file FileMaker 10. Open Task Manager, (Win XP 3) and click on Processes tab, select FileMaker process to watch CPU usage. In FM 10, locate simple layout with text field, click into field and start typing. Hour glass will appear and the key strokes will cease appearing. Cursor bar still shows in field but field does not respond to keyboard entry. Watch the CPUs, mine spike upwards to 98 or so. Click back in field and type. Hour glass will appear again in a few strokes and field looses focus.

Clicking back in the field restores focus and enables entry but CPUs are still extremely high.

Under File>File Options - spelling is set to show questionable spelling with underline but spell check while typing is off. Turning off "questionable" will allow more characters to be entered but did not seem to eliminate the problem.

Tested in FM 9, CPUs stayed in range of 1 to 9, could not reproduce the hour glass, loss of focus problem.