Terrible OneNote 2007 B2TR typing performance on Vista

[Dan Pilone]

Hello,
I don't know where to start investigating this problem, but OneNote 2007
B2TR on Vista slows to a crawl when trying to type. After about 4 words it
can't keep up, then starts dropping characters. Inking seems ok, as does
searching and general interaction with the menus, etc. However, typing just
falls apart. This is on Vista build 5728. Is anyone else seeing this? Any
suggestions on how to fix it? Thanks -- Dan

 

[Patrick Schmid]

If you have the task manager open while typing in ON, do you see a CPU
spike for ON?

Patrick Schmid

 

[Dan Pilone]

Sort of, CPU usage spikes for OneNote to between 20-30% CPU. -- Dan

 

[Patrick Schmid]

Go on connect.microsoft.com, sign up for the OneNote connection and
submit your issue as feedback there. Be sure to indicate the CPU usage
as well.

Patrick Schmid

 

[Dan Pilone]

Thanks - I didn't realize there was a separate ON2007 connection. I
submitted it. -- Dan

 

[Donovan Lange [Microsoft]]

Are you on a Tablet PC, and do you happen to have the pen, writing tools, or
drawing tools toolbar showing?

 

[Dan Pilone]

Yes, yes, and yes... this sounds like you might have a suggestion coming...
-- Dan

 

[Donovan Lange [Microsoft]]

How'd you guess?

Since B2TR, we recently discovered (and fixed) a bug that occurrs if:
- a user is using a post Beta2 Vista build,
- is running in Tablet PC mode (the pen input panel is visible)
- the speech recognition feature of the OS is enabled
- and one or more of the pen/writing/drawing toolbar is showing,
that results in unresponsive typing under moderate CPU loads.

As a workaround, you can try hiding your inking toolbars (not a great
solution, but it should validate the hypothesis that this is actually your
problem) and as a long term solution, try disabling speech recognition.

(As an aside, this was a pretty subtle bug which took Kentaro, our inking
guru, a little over two days to track down and fix. It turns out there was
a change in the Cicero component we use for TIP and Language Bar input
whereby they switched to using RPC calls since Vista Beta 2 and were in fact
eating WM_KEYDOWN messages in their message pump while waiting for a
response. So if you ever wondered why it takes a while for great software
to be released to the world, this may illuminate what goes on during all
that time.

Hope this helps,

Donovan

 

[Dan Pilone]

Donovan,
Thanks much! Hiding the inking toolbars does get rid of the problem - I
seem to be seeing the bug you described. For what it's worth, that's a
pretty impressive set of conditions on that bug. Please pass on my
thanks to Kentaro for tracking it down. I'll copy your reply to my bug
report on connect just for the sake of completeness. Thanks again -- Dan