Hi.

I have an odd problem with a program under XP, and I was hoping one of the windows-experienced programmers here might have an opinion on it (I'm looking at you, Roger ).

Basically, I'm having trouble with the newest version of the PCB CAD package I use, Seetrax DesignerXL. I use a wacom graphics tablet for the thing, and when designing the PCB artwork, have cause to constantly use a couple of commands that can be accessed by keyboard shortcuts. The most common of these commands I have assigned to the soft buttons along the top edge of my Intuos 2 tablet, as keystroke sequences.

For example, to change the origin of the grid the artwork editor uses, you do ALT-G,E as two keystrokes, ie hold down ALT and press G, then release ALT, then press E. In the wacom tablet software you add a sequence like this by going to the correct menu and issuing the keyboard commands you want, and it records them. You can't have just the ALT key on it's own, for the fairly sensible reason that it's a keyboard modifier, not a key as such.

Unfortunately, in DesignerXL this sequence does nothing at all, although it works perfectly in the older version RangerXL. I reported it ages ago as a bug, and recently I was called by the tech support people at Seetrax and we went over the problem trying to nail down exactly what was actually happening, as both they and I were under the impression that it sometimes worked but something made it go away. (This is because in RangerXL you can indeed make keyboard shortcuts go away under rare, ill-defined circumstances)

We eventually discovered that in fact, it works, but in an odd manner. If instead of holding ALT down while pressing a menu key, you press ALT and release it, then press the appropriate menu key, and so on, it works quite happily. Sadly, as you can't assign the ALT key on it's own in the Wacom software, this is of no help

Further experimentation showed that most if not all windows programs will accept this method of using ALT, as well as the first method. For example, in Firefox if you go ALT, then F, you get the file menu, the same as if you go ALT-F. The funny thing is, no-one seems to realise this! Nobody I have talked to, people who have used windows for decades, knew that one could use ALT on it's own, they always used ALT + key rather than ALT, key.

Has this behaviour changed at some point? I'm nearly sure that XP didn't used to do this, but have no way of being sure or of proving it, short of installing an old version on a spare machine. The best theory I have heard so far was from a friend who suggested it might have been added by an update, to support touchscreens, where this sort of serial keyboard modifier might work better than a concurrent one. Or have we all just never even tried it for all these years because we just knew it wouldn't work, and were wrong?

I still maintain it's a bug in DesignerXL, by the way, because if normal Windows behaviour is to accept both methods, it should as well.

pca