Resolved the scrolling freeze when a tooltip pops up

Geobrick

I hope this helps at least one other person who's had to deal with this problem while using Quicken (it turns out not to be a quicken problem).

I posted a year ago about how scrolling transactions in the register will freeze whenever a tooltip (for lack of a better term) pops up under the mouse pointer. This happens when scrolling and the mouse pointer ends up over a transaction entry where the text is too long to display in its existing cell space. A tooltip pops up to display the full text of the cell as shown here (with and without the tooltip popup).

As soon as the tool tip pops up, scrolling freezes until the pointer is moved away for the tooltip. While this isn't specifically a Quicken problem, it would be nice to be able to disable the tooltip popups (maybe that's possible but I haven't found the setting yet - let me know if it can be done).

The scrolling stops because of a windows scrolling option called "Scroll inactive windows when hovering over them". I like this option. I find it useful for several things and have had it turned on for years. Today I finally discovered that it's responsible for causing the annoying scrolling freezes I've been dealing with in Quicken. Turn it off and the problem goes away.

Here's what seems to be happening. When a tooltip pops up under the pointer while scrolling, that tooltip window becomes the inactive window the mouse is hovering over and the active window under the tooltip stops scrolling. All scrolls are waisted away trying to scroll through a single line tooltip popup. Turning off the "Scroll inactive windows when hovering over them" option in windows allows the scrolling to continue whether a tooltip tries to popup or not. Problem solved (except for when I want to scroll inactive windows again, I'll need to turn the option back on).

Chris_QPW

Given your excellent explanation, I can add a bit more to it, and why you probably won't see this in another program.

Windows has what it calls "tool tips". Here is an example of that:

"In Folder: Trash" is the tool tip.

One might think that is displayed in the Quicken register is a Windows tool tip, but it isn't. What they are actually doing creating a window and positioning it in that location so that it will appear in a similar what that a real tool tip would. So, why are they using a window instead of a tool tip?

I can think of two reasons. Tool tips aren't support on all the GUI widgets, and the other reason might be because the tool tips are too limited in what they can display (just some text).

So, the "Quicken register tool tips" are actually windows that will take be in the foreground.