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If I open the project manager and help is not open or if help is opened but minimized, then things work nicely. However in the following situations, wierd things happen: 1. Help window is open and in front of the main window where it is not obscuring the work at hand. Clicking Project in the main menu makes the Help window disappear behind the main window. Clicking Project Manager in the Project menu raises the Project Manager window and brings the Help window to the front again. However it brings it up in a place that obscures the work at hand. I am not sure why it is doing this as it is not displaying help related to the project manager (although there is such a topic). When I close the Project Manager, it resizes my Help window, and I have to resize it back to the way I want it. 2. Help is open but minimized. I open Project Manager and click Help. Help opens with the desired help topics. When I close the Project Manager, the Help is closed. This is unfortunate because this help had a bunch of links to topics about using projects. I have to re-open help and use search to try and find the topic that the Project Manager Help button had opened. The Help search returned 35 entries that I have to search through to try and find the page that the Project Manager had brought up.
There are a host of known issues with regard to the help window's behavior. More or less there are a large number of hacks to allow the help window to remain enabled when a modal dialog is opened - the help component must be reparented to a child dialog of any new modal dialog that is opened. As you can imagine, this has some fairly unfortunate consequences, and there are a number of related open issues (see issue 29448 and its dependency tree). The underlying problem is that AWT windows do not permit limited modality - what we'd really like to do is just specify that the help window should remain enabled even in the case of modal dialogs. But there's pretty much no way to work around it that doesn't create as many problems as they are now. For what its worth, the options that have been considered are: - Run help in a browser (JavaHelp 2.0 *may* support this; there are accessibility issues, etc.) - Run help in a separate JVM (likely to have interprocess communication problems and NB's memory footprint is big enough as it is) - Fake modality by never using real modal dialogs, but having our own code make windows pretend to be disabled (a road to truly unique disaster there)
Created attachment 12976 [details] log file
Attachment of log file was a mistake. Please ignore.
Created attachment 12977 [details] log file
Reassigning to Marek, new owner of output window and help system
fixed for jdk 1.5.0_03/_04 and later
*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 29448 ***
verified in NB.dev(200507131800) / closing ...
This issue had *1 votes* before move to platform component