1995-era installshield woes - foreground window never appears

[Greg Turner]

On Sunday 19 January 2003 08:02 pm, Dan Kegel wrote:
> Data Access Objects
> installer. When you run it, you get to the first
> screen with a big blue background, but the foreground
> window never shows up. It's probably there, but
> invisible, or something. Alt-tab doesn't help, and
> the blue background is full-screen, so you can't

hehe, seen a few of those.  Too bad wine emulates that business so 
nicely :)

> try moving it out of the way.   I have to alt-tab and ^C
> (why that works, I dunno)

Alt tab puts your terminal program in the "foreground".  Unfortunately, 
the blue usurper is full-screen-sized and "always on top" so you don't 
see anything.  ^C now breaks out of wine, killing the program at the 
console.

>  to get out.

I don't have a fix for the fundamental problem, but I do know some 
workarounds: from a system-administration perspective, you can download 
one of the MDAC redistributables, and try to get it to install after 
you are done.  This, I think, will put DAO into your filesystem & 
registry to some extent.

There is also another trick that works under gnome and kde (at least), 
with default setups: hold down the alt key, position the mouse over the 
cursed blue usurper (i.e., anywhere) and hold the left mouse button to 
"drag and drop" the usurper out of your way.  "managed" mode might help 
with this problem as well.  Won't fix wine, but will give you your 
computer back without killing off the debugger.

-- 
gmt

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by
the individual who can labor in freedom." --Albert Einstein