BatteryBar Not Showing Up

[Chris]

That's odd. I didn't change any of that code, so it shouldn't have been different than previous versions.

[Guest]

I have the same problem! BatteryBar won't even show up even though I know I have it installed. The problem is the new NET Framework 4 Client. I'm guess there are compatibility issues that need to be fixed. If there is a way to fix it I would love to know cause I love batterybar!

[Chris]

I have been unable to replicate the issue, and I'm fairly certain I have .NET Framework 4 installed on my dev computer.

Can anyone confirm if they have .NET Framework 4 installed or not that's having this issue?

I'm really perplexed about this because I cannot get my system to give me that error. Is there anyone out there that would like to volunteer to test a debug version of the software to help me narrow down this issue, especially someone that can easily replicate the problem?

I really want to fix this but it's hard not being able to reproduce the error on my end.

[Guest]

This problem just started for me. I had battery bar 3.3 installed and it told me there was an update available, I told it to go ahead and do it. The installer came up and began it's installation. At which time the machine bluescreened. This had to be caused by the installer as this machine has never bluescreened before, and I'm an A+ certified computer technician, so I keep things in good condition. In any event, after rebooting and windows complaining that my bios was old, I went ahead and updated it. After a restart I reinstalled battery bar 3.4.1 and even though you could select the batterybar toolbar nothing will come up. I tried removing and restarting all all sorts of different solutions. I even reinstalled 3.3 with a restart before and after the installations. I haven't tried the .net solution yet because of the peculiar circumstance of this issue coming about.

I'll try a few things and see where it goes, but I figured a little more information about how this problem can come about may be helpful, or perhaps someone will have a few ideas.

[Guest]

Following up, I tried first a simple system restore which did nothing. I then examined my .net installations and everything was copacetic.

The next two things I did at the same time; I first uninstalled Batterybar completely, then manually removed all files and system references to it. After unistallation even when selecting remove all profile information and such, there will still be a couple files hiding here and there. A search on C for batterybar should show everything. You would mainly be looking for an executable which may still exist, as well as a couple xml files stashed in appdata if my memory serves me correctly.

I also installed all updates via windows update, then restarted, and tried to install it. To my surprise it actually worked! Now, I will say that I can't be 100% certain that it was the former of the two, but I have strong suspicions, as batterybar was working fine, and had been for quite some time. I believe that when the computer bluescreened during update a setting file or something of that nature was messed up, and for some reason remained persistent until I manually removed it.

Upon solving the problem I don't know 100% if this problem and those of others in this thread were even remotely similar, but given the symptoms, it may at least point you in the right direction to discover the source of the issue. I hope this helps anybody else with the same problem.

[Chris]

I'm not sure how it's possible for BatteryBar to cause a bluescreen. A blue screen is a kernel panic/error that cannot be caused by any user mode application. The only thing that can cause a blue screen is a bug in the kernel, a hardware problem, or a kernel mode driver.

BatteryBar does use Win32 calls to access the battery driver, but that's the only driver that it accesses. Any problem with the application itself should simply cause Windows to close the application and explorer.exe (if using it as a taskbar toolbar).

I do believe I need to make some updates to the uninstaller to remove an extra file that I added recently to the installer. The files in %APPDATA%\BatteryBar should be removed by the installer if you answer "Yes" to that question during uninstall. Clearly I need to make an effort to improve the uninstaller.

[Guest]

I thoroughly believe the bluescreen to have been caused by the battery management system. Win 7 and Vista battery management is a complete mess. I think that during the update something got scrambled and caused the driver/kernel to break down. I think that batterybar breaking was completely because the bluescreen happened during the install. I didn't mean to intimate that it was batterybar's fault only that batterybar had been broken, and how it had been broken, in effort to give you an idea of where to look for issues. Also, the uninstaller does not remove itself from the registry, not really important, but I figured that if you plan on working on the uninstaller, you may want to know. Could have been a quirk along with the other issues my system was having, I can't be sure of that.

In any event, I also wanted to mention that I still love batterybar, and you've done an excellent job on it. Were it not so awesome I would have spent time trying to get it working again, lol. Keep up the good work on an excellent utility.