Autocontrol stops working ?

[Dimitri G]

Hi there,

I've switched to Autocontrol and I see its potential but... it's... quirky to configure and not that intuitive. Eg : you have a close tab action and a close tabS advanced action (with the possibility to apply to... ) and only figured out today why my actions were closing tabs on other windows... 

But anyway... a bigger issue at the moment is : it stops working for some reason and I can 'fix' it by uninstalling and reinstalling it again. This is what I get : 

So the action is not executed correctly? (that red cross?) - even though it's properly configured (as you can see) and about 10 mins ago, it was giving a green checkmark? 

Would appreciate any help :)

[AutoControl support]

Please try the "Emergency repair" option that's explained in the "Help" section. That should fix the problem and you should also see a message box explaining why your gestures were not responding.

Let us know if you get any additional hints that way.

[Dimitri G]

A late reply but thanks for the support! 
It took a while as I couldn't reproduce the error... But... it happened again just now and after that Emergency Repair, it worked again :-)   
This is what it gave as the cause of the problem : (I will leave it as it is currently and will enable those options in the Advanced Options if it happens again - especially as both the TAB and the LEFT ALT were not stuck physically) 

[AutoControl support]

It looks like the Alt+Tab combination for switching between programs could be the culprit.

Another user some time ago reported that he installed a program called "Alt-Tab Terminator" which was run as administrator whereas the browser run as a normal user (hence AutoControl too). This prevented AutoControl from seeing the ALT and TAB keys being released (because high-privilege programs prevent low-privilege programs from observing keyboard/mouse input).

AutoControl is designed to detect that situation and recover from it; however, it's possible that there is some corner case that hasn't been consider.

Does this look like it could be your situation?

[Dimitri G]

Alas, I wish I could pinpoint it to this (or a comparable program) but this is a 'fresh' Windows 11 install with the bare essentials (Chrome, gfx drivers, Total Commander and so on...). I'm testdriving this "image" for about 2 weeks as it's a new system I've built and I want to be sure of its stability (before installing anything else). 
But... your response got me thinking : I still have an unconfigured Stream Deck attached to this system and this might be culprit? Shooting arrows in the dark here but I couldn't say what might trigger that behaviour? 

May I thank you for your professional followup? I won't take more of your time and should it reappear again, I will disconnect that Stream Deck and try to reproduce the error... And I will update this conversation accordingly :-) 

[AutoControl support]

If one of your Stream Deck buttons is configured to simulate keystrokes, it's might be possible that whichever software routine is injecting the keystrokes is injecting a key-press without a corresponding key-release. If this was the case, then AutoControl would see that the key is stuck down.

A quick fix for this situation is to configure AutoControl to ignore synthetic input (Options > Advanced Options > Ignore synthetic input).

In your case it should be easy to check for this problem. Just press all your Stream Deck buttons one by one and see if AutoControl still responds after each press.