Wallpaper does not react to click

[Fanvaron]

I just bought and installed WP Engine and was playing around with the default wallpapers, when I landed on the sheep one, I was a little stumped what it was about and while switching windows I accidentally clicked the sheep, while losing focus of another window and I picked it up, but then nothing else I could not drop it or anything until I switched window again and it dropped it.
So it seems that the wallpaper does not react to clicks right, it only does so when switching focus from another window but not when I'm just on the desktop.

After googling and reading about it I tried:
- Using the Beta build of Wallpaper Engine
- Installing the latest Flash player for chromium
- Restarting my PC after all that
- Using the 32x and 64x version

But nothing helped I still can only click when switching focus from another window.
I hope someone can help me with this, since I just bought this and if it really does not work for me I would need to know so rather quickly so I can still return it.

[Biohazard]

Are any other programs installed that modify the desktop somehow? Which version of Windows are you using?

[Fanvaron]

Hey, thanks for the reply.
I'm using window 10 with the new creator's update (unfortunately I did not have a chance to test it before the update)
Other than that I tried disabling pretty much everything in my autostart. The only thing that even remotely has anything to do with the desktop is the classic window start menu.
I just got the Idea to test if starting in safe mode helps, so I will test that real quick.
Other than that, I have an AMD graphics card with the Radeon driver ver. 17.1.1 if that could have anything to do with it.

[Fanvaron]

Ok, so I did try out booting in safe mode, and it did work I could click and spawn sheep. I'm not sure if this rules out that this is the creators updates fault. But I'm pretty sure it is not my classic start menu, which intrestengly even starten in safe mode. Other than that I litteraly only have the windows defender, my audio driver, my password manager and ear trumpet (a better volume control) in start menu.
I also tried only using 1 monitor since that was one of the things that changed in safe mode but that did not help either.
The only thing left in my task manager running right now that I did not test is the Radeon driver manager. But I don't really know if I even can stop the graphics driver short of deinstalling it or starting in safe mode.

[Fanvaron]

Since the graphics driver was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ itself trying to upgrade I went ahead and uninstalled it, did not help. Only thing I noticed was that sheep.exe used a whopping 85% cpu, but after installing the newest driver and restarting it went down to around 4-5% again.
So now I'm completely out of ideas for what to do.

[Biohazard]

I don't think the clicking issue has anything to do with drivers. Do you have multiple monitors? Are any anti-virus programs installed? Could upload the log.txt from here C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\wallpaper_engine\log.txt to www.pastebin.com ?

Also, is the wallpaper maybe just paused for some reason, or does i.e. the water still have an animation while clicks are not registered?

[Fanvaron]

Yes I do have 2 monitors, but I tried unplugging one of them earlier without success
No anti Virus programms.
The wallpaper is still running the sheep is walking etc.

The log file right now is pretty simple.

2017-06-05T14:06:10Z: NVAPI init: -2
2017-06-05T14:06:11Z: Failed parsing config.json: File empty.
2017-06-06T19:18:54Z: NVAPI init: -2
2017-06-06T19:30:19Z: NVAPI init: -2
2017-06-06T19:41:31Z: NVAPI init: -2

the config.json has a content at the moment : https://pastebin.com/csm1FwFt
I removed my name at the top though it might be worth to note that it has a space and an ö in it.

[Biohazard]

Thanks, it doesn't look like any errors are logged. By what you are describing I think that either the mouse hook which is processing the clicks isn't called or your desktop uses an unexpected name/class for its window.

I'd have to add some messages into the program to debug it further. Could you try to disable any kind of hooks like AMD ReLive or anything else they might have? Since any hook might easily go and consume the clicks.

[Fanvaron]

Ok, so I checked, ReLive is not installed, besides it also did not work without the whole radeon stuff which I tried when I updated.
Other than that I don't really have any background programs running.
I looked at the task list and did not really see anything other than a lot of windows stuff.
Maybe you can find anything that looks like it might be the culprit?
https://pastebin.com/raw/3w5igZuX

For the extra debugging, could you compile a version and send it to me directly? (since I guess you would not want to push it to steam)

[Fanvaron]

I just browsed some wallpapers and I came upon one that followed the mouse: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=864003822
And this did indeed work, so the mouse position does get registered by the program.

[Biohazard]

That one is web based, so it's different from the other one. Does the mouse work on any other Unity based wallpaper like this one: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=875477924 ?

Originally posted by Mr. Muttsurini:

For the extra debugging, could you compile a version and send it to me directly? (since I guess you would not want to push it to steam)

I can't right now because I'm in the middle of changing how wallpapers are assigned to monitors to improve multi monitor support.


Could you download this http://windowdetective.sourceforge.net/ , use the 'pick window' button at the top and select the desktop window while the wallpaper is running? And then send me a screenshot like this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nvwwnz0f1jb8c2l/wdet.png?dl=0

syslistview32 should be selected automatically by selecting the desktop. Right click it to open the properties for comparison.

[Fanvaron]

The world wallpaper does register the mouse movement by highlighting the tiles on the planet but again no reaction to clicks.
The screenshot is here: https://www.pic-upload.de/view-33304488/Unbenannt.jpg.html

When I saw the error at the bottom (zugriff verweigert, which is german for access denied) I started it as admin but it still shows up.

[Fanvaron]

I uninstalled a bunch of stuff I am not actively using anymore and it seems anything there did run in the background and interfered with the desktop, im not entirely sure but I suspect that it was AutoIt or the Autoit Inspector.

Thank you so much for your time and effort spent in trying to solve my problem, and of course for creating this excellent piece of software.

[Biohazard]

Glad you could solve it.

Yes I saw the i.e. sticky notes process but haven't heard of any AutoIt issues before so I didn't want to ask you to remove a dozen of things by random. The window properties also looked fine. Should it come back I could still add some messages to see where it's going wrong. Clicking and moving are basically the same path so the code in question could only be a couple of lines.

[Fanvaron]

Upon further inspections I found out, the culprit was a program, that makes my sound keys only change the current windows sound.
Anyways the problem was, that the program gui was placed as a desktop child, to prevent it from showing in the task bar and the win+tab list.

The reason why I did not suspect that as the problem was that my friend who made the program uses wallpaper engine as well and it worked for him when I asked him to test it.
So the problem was not consistent, especially since the gui only ever gets created when I change the volume.
Anyways I thought I should tell you, in case something like that happens again.