I have been plagued with an issue with SendKeys and SendDragonkeys that for the life of me I cannot figure out what the root causes is for the last couple weeks I am hoping someone might be able to help me out. Anytime I tried to use either of those two functions I notice that I lose the focus of the window at least in DragonPad so for example if it's just a loop hitting the delete button it will delete the first couple characters and then I'll see the window go out of focus and it obviously will stop deleting at that point. In other windows it doesn't pull the focus away it just fails to work altogether. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence but around the same time a few weeks back I ended up having to kill a weird process that looked like it was an invisible window maybe it was being used by SendKeys or SendDragonkey's but I'm not hundred percent sure. Right now I had to switch all of those functions to use Sendsystemkeys as for whatever reason that function is not affected. The problem is it's just too darn slow for certain tasks and I really like to figure out what happened to SendKeys.

 

I have done the following:

on a VM installed Dragon added my profile everything works

complete reinstall of Dragon and used Dragon 15 clean on my existing computer even a new profile I'm getting the same behavior (not fixed)

 

This lends me to believe that it's some type of Windows library issue.I'm open to any and all suggestions at this point. I even tried to identify what the focus window it jumps to was but when I use any script the window title for the focus is empty doesn't tell me much

 

Unfortunately, our most common support recommendation is still ignored by many. Uninstalling and reinstalling Dragon doesn't fix any problem 99.9% of the time. You not only make extra work for yourself but in this case, you just sacrificed 1 of your 4 activations. When Dragon fully launches and works at all, the problem isn't likely Dragon. A corrupted user profile is often the problem but in this case you can't blame a loss of focus on Dragon. I assure you this has nothing to do with Dragon. We don't have a solution other than ruling out Dragon. We recommend looking for a recent computer setting change or a utility that is stealing focus; the most common culprit

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Are you using DPI 15.61?  Sendkeys works much better in that version.

Hi Lunis,

Interesting. I contacted DragonSupport regarding reinstalling Dragon. They told me if I reinstalled it on the same computer I would not be using up one of my 5 installations. Please let me know if this is erroneous advice. Thank you.

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A.S.

We believe Nuance dropped the installation count to 4, beginning with Ver. 14.

Keep in mind that the Myanmar support team doesn't use Dragon. They can only regurgitate Dragon support notes which are not always kept up-to-date.

Reinstalling Dragon over the top of a current installation won't be a problem but uninstalling and reinstalling Dragon can cost an activation. As previously stated, 99% of the time, reinstalling Dragon doesn't help because it is not the problem. There are a number of possibilities but the most common one appears to be a corrupted or bloated user profile.

We suspect the server isn't smart enough to recognize a reinstallation. Fixing this issue might not be cost-effective as Nuance would have to pull programmers off from development.

Nuance probably didn't expect their customers to wait 6 years for the next release. Most of their R&D goes into DMO (the A-Team). If Nuance had released Dragon 16 in the usual two-year rotation, this problem would not have occurred so frequently. Fortunately, we noted that it's usually pretty easy to get Nuance support (800) 654-1187 to rollback an activation.

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To narrow down the problem I think you should close as many potentially interfering applications as possible, i.e. close everything (including apps showing in the system tray only), start Dragon _only_ and test your SendKeys script in DragonPad.

 

If it works now, one of the applications you closed is stealing the focus from time to time and you can start bringing them back one by one to find the culprit.

 

If it still happens, it could be an application still running without a visible window.

There are some legitimate uses for this (such as having a target for messages from other applications), but, unfortunately, some malware cannot be ruled out.

I even had a customer where an Amazon browser plugin would steal the focus once in a while.

 

I've attached a small application I wrote a while ago showing the window holding the focus at the moment and the process this window belongs to. Perhaps you can use this to find out where the focus goes one it leaves DragonPad.

 

hth,

mav

@Mav - I think my anti-virus software (Norton) is blocking the download of the zip file. Is this something for which you are willing to share the code?

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-Edgar
DPI 15.3, 64-bit Windows 10 Pro, OpenOffice & Office 365, Norton Security, Shure X2U XLR to USB mic adapter with Audio Technica DB135 vocal mic, Asus X299-Deluxe Prime, Intel Core i9-7940X (14 core, 4.3 GHz overclocked to 4.9 GHz), G.SKILL TridentZ Series 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4 3333 (PC4 26600) F4-3333C16Q-64GTZ, NVIDIA GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 GV-N1060G1 GAMING-6GD REV 2.0 6GB graphics card with 3 1920x1080 monitors

I'm afraid I can't share the code, but the executable itself has been scanned by Sophos before zipping it.

Perhaps you could turn off your Norton (I pity you for using this tool) for the download (simply by downloading a zip file you cannot catch any malware!) and then scan the file afterwards to make sure it's safe.

 

mav