tomg

Brian and Peter + , Peter's comments made me think. Could it be that if you create a PTE show in Vista then it will run in Vista? That is certainly what Peter seems to have found. One of my AV's - I'll call it the "big one" ( 28mb) - always hung on the Vista laptop ( and I tried it several times). But it had been created on my Regular XP Pro Desktop PC. A test was needed here. I installed PTE 5 on the Vista Laptop and transferred all the files associated with the "big one" to the Vista Laptop. This wasn't difficult because the image files, project files and sound files were all in the same "big one" folder. It was then a simple matter to create a "big one" PTE.exe file on the Vista Laptop. I played it and it didn't hang ! So it seems to be true that if you make an AV in Vista it will run in Vista, without hanging. For me this is a partial success. Sure it seems that I can re-run all my AV's through the Vista Laptop and they will work. But it is a Club Laptop and various members from time to time will want to copy and paste their AV's to the Laptop desktop and take the package ( Laptop and Projector) on the road. And just about all the members will have created their AV's on a Computer with XP . So it is a fair bet that many of the AV's will hang. But we have made some progress here. Thank you Peter and Brian. Tom

I forgot to mention that I did try Igor's suggestion of creating the AV in windowed mode. This overcomes the hanging problem but it results in the picture having a visible frame around it and of course it is not full screen - which is desirable. Tom

Brian's comments are revealing. My Laptop is a Toshiba L40 with Vista Home premium. I bought it for my Camera Club, with a Benq projector. It is planned that a few members will take the laptop/projector combination on the road - mostly to other Camera Clubs - to give PTE presentations. About ten AV's at a time would be copied and pasted to the Laptop Desktop and shown in succession through an evening. The "hanging" business is a nuisance but what can we do about it? I could take the Laptop back to PC World and show them Brian's info. But I hate the prospect of having to argue with them about it. Tom

Thank you all for the references to previous posts on this issue. I had no idea it was such a widespread issue. I have dragged and dropped a couple of PTE 5 AV's to a USB pendrive and then copied and pasted the AV's to the desktop of the problem Vista laptop. The smaller AV ( 7mb) closes OK but the second AV ( 25mb) fails to close at the end. When I press Ctrl,Alt, Delete I get a message "program not responding". There is a tab that says "view problem details" and when I click that I get a description : "A problem caused this program to stop interacting with windows". Then there is a list of "Problem Signatures" : Problem Event name - "AppHang B1". Hang Signature - "fb8f". Hang Type - "515". there follows more "additional hang signatures". Only a technician would understand the above but as a layman it is simply that Vista does not work with PTE. There was a suggestion that the Laptop should be taken back to the retailer - in my case PC World - and I may have to do that. But I will try your last suggestion,Igor, before I resort to such drastic action. Tom

I've made PTE 5 AV's on my Laptop with Win XP. When I play them on my Camera Club's laptop , with Vista Home, they play OK but stay on the screen at the end, when they should disappear ( as they do on my own Laptop). Pressing the ESC key doesn't help. Is there a fix for this?

Thanks Alan,Ken and Limey. It's easy when you know how! My next problem is choosing sixty seconds of wild scary music. I have tried an extract from Stravinsky's "Rites of Spring" but it's not fierce enough. Any suggestions? Best Regards, Tom

I have prepared a simple PTE show with 20 slides that I change manually with the mouse. There is no background music as I simply talk through the show. However, when slide 6 comes on I would like it to trigger a short burst of music. When the music stops I would carry on talking. Can anyone advise how I can add just a single music track like this?