Platform: Windows XP

This past week I was working on a network integration for a business my current company bought. We inherited their outdated installation of MAS 200 from Best Software (ahem, the audacity). Anyhow, we replaced their "suitable only for m0n0wall" 6 year old beige-bomb computers with state o' the art HP Desktops with widescreen displays. Everything worked fine, reinstalling the software on the new profiles worked great.

Except there were "sporatic" problems. Several of the dialogs for MAS have scrolling windows of line items, and we were getting complaints that the users could not highlight the line items at times. Click and nothing happens.

Our local deputy-IT tech figured it out. It turns out this app cannot handle working on the new widescreen 16:10 displays. If the dialog box appears beyond the area that corresponds to the 4:3 section (approximately the left 2/3's of the display) and the user tries to click on the line items in the dialog box, the clicks are ignored. Move the dialog box to the left 2/3's of the screen, and it works. I've NEVER seen anything like this before. We even determined if the window was positioned on the imaginary Mason-Dixon line between the 4:3 and 16:10 spots, you could click the line items on the left hand side of the dialog, but not the right. Note that scrollbars on windows worked fine, as did buttons. Just the line items were affected.

So, the "solution" has a few possibilities. In some cases, we ran the widescreen displays with a 4:3 resolution (i.e. 1024X768 or 1154X864) which of course results in fat wide video that's not crisp. Religiously speaking, I'm opposed to this but many of the users liked the larger display and didn't mind the "fat" view. The other solution is to move the dialog boxes over when a user discovers the window isn't clickable. I'm sure there's a patch or update that negates this issue, but this app is going to be replaced by others in the near future so we're not interested in going through all the other maintenance headaches to change it.

So, if your windows don't work, did you recently switch to a widescreen display? Strange.