gPhotoShow Products Support Forum

On my windows 7 laptop, G photo locks up on one of the slides in the screen show and will not advance. Sometimes the show simply will not activate. What could be causing it not to start or if started, to get stuck on one of the slides? It becomes necessary to cont. / alt. / del to stop the show and resume operation of the pc. Rarely will it operate a expected. Thanks for any help.

Which gPhotoShow version are you using ?

Gphoto Pro 5.2.2

Strange as it always worked before and just started acting up a week or so ago. No new programs were added to the PC.

The most common causes of this kind of issues are video and audio files, if you configured gPhotoShow to play video or audio try disabling them.
Another thing to check is DirectX, if you are using Pan&Zooom or DirectX transitions try to set standard 2D transitions.

I already am using 2D transitions. When I disable video, gPhoto works fine, re-enable video and it locks up again. I noticed gPhoto is also resetting the screen saver wait time to 1 minute whatever that might mean. I uninstalled gPhoto, scanned and removed all references to it in the registry and in program files. Then I reinstalled and have the same problem.I was using version 2.0.5 of Video Lan and upgraded to version 2.0.6. Still have the problem. I checked other screen savers and they work correctly (just to make sure it wasn't a PC problem.) What else would you suggest? Thanks.

gPhotoShow doesn't install any shared component, unstalling/installing it again usually doesn't help to fix problems.
Video files are played by external programs and sometimes this is the cause of problems. By default avi and mpg files are played by Windows Media player, mov files are played by QuickTime. Sometimes their installation got corrupted and they crash when used from third party programs. Usually VLC works much better, but only installing it is not enough, did you configure gPhotoShow to use it ? See this FAQ.
If gPhotoShow crashes with and without VLC then probably on your computer there is some kind of problem with display adapter drivers or with something else but it's hard to guess what is going wrong. At some point in the past something got corrupted on your computer but it's is very difficult to suggest a solution. Probably the only workaround is to disable video.

Interestingly, if I run the screen saver as a preview in the screen saver settings dialog box gphoto works perfectly.

Interesting, gPhotoShow is not aware whether it is running from the preview or it has been started as a screen saver, it works in the same way. However windows has different security settings. When you run it as preview gPhotoShow runs as a user program under your account, without any restriction. When it is started as screen saver windows may apply some restrictions. Usually these restrictions allow programs to use DirectX and activex components but in some cases it is possible this is not allowed. For example when running as logon screen saver a program can't use DirectX or activex components. It is possible that some program you are using changed security settings on your computer and this prevented the screen saver from using activex components. Or maybe an updated antivirus/firewall applies further restrictions to what a screen saver can do.

I reset Video Lan to its default settings and now gPhoto works fine.