Sage GUI Disappears Completely

[valerio]

I have debugged this problem, on and off, for a couple of months now and I just wanted to share my findings.

After upgrading to Windows 7 Home Premium final release, I noticed that upon turning-on my home theater tuner and TV Sage is nowhere to be found, only the Windows desktop would show. After some research I found that the process is actually running, but the Sage GUI and toolbar icon are gone. If you click on Sage to run it again, it comes right up (the indication that the process was actually running).

So I set to find out what was going on, mostly since this problem never occurred while running Win7 RC.

To make a long story short the culprit is the shut down sequence of the home theater tuner and TV. If I turn the Tuner off first and then the TV, and when I turn them on I do the reverse, TV > Wait a few seconds > Tuner, all is fine, but otherwise Sage GUI disappears. I downgraded and upgraded my Nvidia drivers and nothing changes.

In addition, if you turn on the Tuner first and then the TV, the resolution gets knocked down and Sage then appears at a lower resolution on the upper-left corner of the TV as opposed to be at 1920x1080. You then have to exit full screen and re-enter to resize it properly. I also experienced at times issues where Sage come up but the whole screen is black and you then have to use the keyboard and mouse to exit full screen and re-enter to get the GUI to show.

To circumvent the problem I am now using the remote control set to use Windows Messages so I can bring up Sage from neverland even when I forget how to turn on the systems.

I realize that apparently Windows detects the monitor being gone and somehow messes with the resolution, but I am not sure on why SageTV disappears altogether. The issue does not even generate an error in the Sage debug logs, I take since Sage still runs.

I think this is something for tech support to review, but then again maybe it only happens to me.

Anybody out there experiencing the same issue?

Valerio