Pop-up Window Fails to Appear in Windows 7

Question

I have been scratching my head about this issue for a while:

I use Visual Studio 2005 as my development environment, running on Windows 7 Professional.

I use components from Infragistics for development, including what is called an UltraRibbon When I use property links that are found in the properties description area, Visual Studio will act as if there is a modal pop-up window in front of it, but there will be no pop-up visible. The only solution I've found to get control of VS again is to kill the program from the task manager. I found ways around using the pop-ups for editing and forgot about the issue.

Then the following occurred:

The software I use has an email function that pop-ups up a mailto window (using Outlook, or whatever the default email program is) and the pop-up is modal (it shouldn't be, but that's another issue altogether); When I select the option that would bring this pop-up into view, the application freezes, as if there was a modal pop-up in front of it, however there is none, but if I click Outlook open and then close it, the software unfreezes. (Note: The Software is running in Debug mode initiated by Visual Studio)

I believe that there is an issue with Visual Studio that is causing Modal Pop-up's to appear invisible, or off screen somewhere, in cases where external applications are referenced. It doesn't seem to be a problem for regular Pop-ups.

What is going on with my system? Are these two situations related? Any help would be great. I have not found any specific references to anything like this when I googled the issues I was seeing.

Answer 1

If your modal popup is off the screen you could try moving the window.

Alt+Space will bring up the window menu and then pressing M will select move.

After this you can use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move the window. After you have used the arrow keys, the window may jump back to the mouse if you move it.

I was able to verify that the above steps work with the following example:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Form f = new Form();
    f.Text = "test";
    f.Load += f_Load;
    f.ShowDialog();
}

void f_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    ((Form)sender).Location = new Point(-1000, -1000);
}