VZAccess Manager, Windows 2000 Professional and GDI Objects

brendanhoar · EVDO Heavy User Joined: 09 Jun 2005 Posts: 140

[Michael - is there some way to pass this report on to Verizon and Smith Micro? I am using 5.2.6 (1146n).]

One thing I have noticed on my Thinkpad T40 running Windows 2000 Professional:

Since using my Novatel V620 card, I've seen incidents of a Windows problem that used to be very rare increase substantially. When launching an application after the machine has running for a while without a reboot (days, sometimes over a week), the screen would go all crazy and would be impossible to use. Immediately quitting the launched application (blindly) would cause it to settle down, but the problem was repeatable.

I remember from the occassional times I had similar problems on other machines over the years that the cause is typically one or more applications hogging what the Task Manager calls "GDI Objects".

And sure enough, the last time this happened, I quit the app to get my screen back, launched the Task Manager, added the GDI Objects column, and VZAccess Manager had almost 10000 GDI Objects assigned.

Quitting and restarting VZAccess Manager reduced the number to 105 objects. However, after an hour of running, it's up to about 240 GDI Objects, and I am sure it will only increase in a somewhat linear fashion.

As you can see here, there are limitations under Win2K and WinXP on how many GDI Objects can be allocated by one process and/or by the system before things go nuts:

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=95593

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=100423&t=1127739168&page=1#comment1026999

And even quicktime developers have felt the burn:

http://lists.apple.com/archives/QuickTime-java/2001/Dec/msg00028.html

It's clearly a bug in VZAccess Manager (though I think Microsoft is partly to blame as well). Similar to a memory leak, but with a different resource.

Rebooting daily on this system isn't an option, so restarting VZAccess Manager daily is currently my workaround.

-brendan