Tray icon becomes unresponsive (2.1.152)

For a little while now I’ve had an issue with GW’s tray icon becoming unresponsive, even though the program is probably working okay apart from that. For example, this morning during a long unresponsive period the number of new notifications updated correctly, but hovering the pointer over the icon gets no tooltip, and left or right single- or double-clicking on it gets no response. I therefore have to restart glasswire.exe to get a responsive tray icon restored.

This unresponsiveness can happen at program startup, but can happen at any other time in a session too, so it can happen several times in a session, each time requiring a restart of glasswire.exe (via Anvir Task Manager). I think this had started happening before I updated the program to 2.1.152. I can’t link occurrences of this to any particular event or action on the computer - all the more so as the start of the unresponsive condition hardly announces itself, so I never know the point at which it’s gone into sulkies.

Anyone else been experiencing this?

Philip

@PhilipGoddard

Do you see a .dmp file on your desktop after this issue appears?

No. Never had any .dmp file appear on my desktop.

@PhilipGoddard

Our UI person is now investigating. If anyone else has this issue please let us know here. Thanks.

That’s great to hear - how about that for responsiveness! :slight_smile:

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There’s an additional tray icon glitch, which seems to occur independently of what I reported in my OP. Sometimes the icon is just shades of lightish grey, as though to signify that it isn’t properly running. That can be the case (though usually isn’t) when the icon’s gone unresponsive, but it can also happen, as just now, and the icon and UI be apparently still fully functional. Dunno what’s going on there! :slight_smile:

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And this type of crash has never happened before for you with previous GlassWire versions? The reason I ask is because we have not made any changes to this part of the software in a long time, so it’s strange it started crashing for you.

In support of @PhilipGoddard’s report I experienced these three problems he mentions in 2018:

  1. Many irregular occurrences of the GlassWire icon turning grey. This is the most common problem. It last happened in mid December 2018.

  2. A few occurrences of the GlassWire icon being unresponsive when it has not turned grey. I cannot remember the last date this occurred but it was in the second half of 2018.

  3. At least one occurrence of the GlassWire icon turning grey on startup. This was in early 2018.

But I have not had these problems since just after I started checking the Things view every day on 18 December 2018.

Right now, Glasswire has run without problem since the last system reboot on February 14 and the last GlassWire update to 2.1.152 on February 19.

If the icon issues have stopped because of my actions then three changes are possibly relevant:

  1. Every day I open GlassWire from the system tray icon. I could surmise that GlassWire works better when it doesn’t have to cross more than one date boundary.

  2. I always close GlassWire while it is in the Alerts view. In other words, I haven’t had any problem since I stopped leaving GlassWire in the Graph view. I consider this the most relevant difference. So which view is @PhilipGoddard using when this happens? Is it always the same view?

  3. I’ve been running on Windows 1809 since October 2018 so that may be relevant to why I haven’t had problems 2 and 3 since then.
    Incidentally, I’ve found 1809 to be more stable than earlier versions and I avoided some of the conditions that created problems for some users:
    e.g. I don’t store my files in the default locations so I didn’t have the missing files problem.
    e.g. I installed from an ISO image on a USB stick so I avoided the slow update problem.
    image

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I’ve switched back to leaving GlassWire in the Graph view. If any of the problems return now then it will narrow down potential sources.

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This comes from my experience with unresponsive systray icon (all systray icon).

Open Task Manager, go to Details, then find explorer.exe.
Right click on it, choose End task.
Then still on Task Manager, File > Run new task, type explorer and hit Enter
This should fix any unresponsive systray icons

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I’ve held back on adding to this thread, because shortly after my last post here the problem stopped, and I wanted to wait awhile to see if this was a real cessation or just a passing blip. The cessation didn’t correspond with a GW version update, so I assume that some other change on my system - presumably an update of a Windows component or one of my third-party security programs - was the cause.

Not only that, but another, much more long-standing, issue stopped at the same time. That is, the repeated reversion to less-than-ideal default GW window position and dimensions on program startup - not always but more often than not. I do still get a grey tray icon (still with full function), but only as a rarity - which underlines my assumption that that’s a separate issue.

My thanks (over and over!) to the GW team for this uniquely valuable program, and their responsiveness to their user base in developing and debugging GW.

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@PhilipGoddard

I’m glad the problems went away. For the UI issue, several users tested pre-released versions with logging and we appreciated their help in solving this! If you were one of those people then thank you!