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May 26, 2016

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Synergis Product Support Specialist, Mark Lancaster
A couple of recent cases reminded me of an issue that I had many years ago when I was teaching Vault to a group of designers.  Days leading up to the training I had documented and practiced the steps so that I would be ready and everything would go smoothly.  Within a second or so of starting the training session, my Vault client locked up completely on me.  At that point you start panicking because prior to that everything worked.   What could be the issue?  Now I have a conference room full of designers who are now thinking to themselves, this is what the company wants us to use…
At that time I was a customer of Synergis and I frantically placed a called to their help desk pleading for assistance (since I was stuck in a middle of an important training session).  When Synergis quickly called back, I started going through everything they suggested that I do.  One of the steps was to try the same workflow on another machine.  Which I did and presto it worked.  Then I realized what the issue was on my machine.      
When I was working at my desk, my laptop was on a docking station and a monitor was connected to that.  When I was performing my Vault operations, the (vault) client window was always over on the monitor.   When I undocked my laptop for training and started up Vault, the log in dialog was sitting off the laptop screen and was waiting for my input.  Thus to me it looked like Vault had hung in the training session.
So my article is offering you a quick Microsoft Windows tip that I used to resolve my issue years ago and the two cases that I recently had.    When any Windows application appears to be stuck or hung, try this to see if it resolves the issue.

  • Select the ALT+Spacebar key combo (let go)
  • Select the M key (which means move the current window)
  • Select either the left or right arrow key (on keyboard)
  • Move the mouse. (If you have a window or dialog off the screen it will trap itself to the mouse pointer thus allowing you to place the window on the correct monitor)

Hopefully this information is useful to you…