Monday, August 20, 2007

Vista File Save As Dialog Gone Wrong

I click "Save As" one day in my favourite application only to be very confused:

Ahem, where do I enter the filename?? Which folder is empty?! Let's try clicking the "Browse Folders" button:

OK, now my folder is not empty but still nowhere to change folder or enter the filename.

One last try, let's click the "Hide Folders" button:
Now, this was in Mozilla Firefox. So who's to blame, Firefox or Vista? It is a standard dialog provided by Windows so it would be odd for Firefox to cause this. However it was not occurring in other applications at the time and trying again to save a file in Firefox resulted in the same mess. Even the breadcrumb/navigation bar was missing! Maybe OLE/COM initialisation related, who knows...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have the same problem on one Vista machine, but not on another. The file Save As dialog comes up exactly as you describe, but only when invoked from a virtual printer that actually creates a file. In the other apps where I used "File - Save As" from the main menu the dialog worked fine.

On another Vista machine I *was* seeing the screwed up dialog, but a few weeks later the same tests had the dialog working correctly. I really need to know what this is about.

DisplayNameHere said...

I have never seen that behaviour again, but that probably doesn't help you, sorry :)

Anonymous said...

I see the same behavior if I have aero enabled. Otherwise it is correct.

Anonymous said...

You've probably fixed the problem already, but in case anyone else wanders to this page looking for a solution (as I did), here's how I fixed it:

If you have Aero (transparency along the top of dialog boxes) enabled, disable it. To do this, right click on your desktop, select personalize, then Window Color and Appearance. Uncheck "Enable Transparency" and press ok. Check that the dialog box now shows everything it normally does--if not, I don't know, it was fine for me. If you then want Aero back, you can enable it again by checking the "Enable Transparency" box again. Mine works fine both ways--I think somehow switching between the two reverts the settings back to how they were, so it might work in reverse as well.

tomva said...

Sorry to comment on such an old posting! But I have been using Vista for just a day or so now, and I am absolutely amazed at how bad the SaveAs dialog was implemented. How did Microsoft break such an important component?

Some of the issues I've noticed:
- mousewheel doesn't work in the window you are hovering in. You have to select the window by clicking (!). Even worse, clicking on the scrollbar you want to move won't work--you have to click somewhere in the window.
- directory tree is hidden by default. You have no idea where you are, and it is hard to find the directory window!
- even when you show the directory tree, it is surprisingly hard to navigate. The directory tree is tiny.
- There is no button to quickly pop up a level of the hierarchy. You have to click around in the tiny directory window.

In short, there seems to be an awful lot of precious real estate allocated to blank space, and the most useful items are small and hard to use. I would love to see the spec for the SaveAs changes!

Anonymous said...

logically