User objects

A while back I wrote about 2 applications, The KMPlayer and JCreator not behaving well when attempting to run both concurrently (see post).

Now, I have an incredibly weird situation on my system. KMPlayer and JCreator don’t play nice together. If they’re both open, some JCreator panels and menus are suddenly blank and don’t refresh and the side tabs panel is transparent, showing thru to the desktop. As for KMPlayer, I can’t open anything, clicking play (which plays the last file opened when nothing else has been loaded) does nothing, and certain items are mysteriously missing from the context menu. This hasn’t been a big deal for me, and I still use both JCreator and KMPlayer, but it would be nice if they worked together. Also, I have to wonder, what is the common component causing the conflict here, what would a media player and a java IDE both be using or trying to access concurrently? (assuming there is a conflict for a common component, which I suspect might be the issue here)

My suspicion was wrong, it was not a conflict between the applications or a common component, it was the system running out of User objects. In Winforms (and I suspect most other GUI toolkits as well) any GUI control or window will consume at least 1 user object (more complex controls, with multiple sub-components will consume more User objects), and when the system or process hits the limit (65,536 for the user session, 200 – 18,000 per-process; default is 10,000 on Windows XP), creation of new User objects will fail, even if the system has enough memory to support whatever it is that’s being created. On the .NET Framework, you’ll notice this if you get an exception that looks similar to the following,

System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: Error creating window handle. at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.CreateHandle(CreateParams cp) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateHandle() at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl(Boolean fIgnoreVisible) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl(Boolean fIgnoreVisible) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl()

I’m still puzzled as to why there simply isn’t a limit based on available memory, but I haven’t been able to find a whole lot written on User objects in general much less details on why they exist.