Shortcut to Netbeans on Vista
Strange anomaly
I am a big fan of the long discontinued MS Office Shortcut Bar. You can still install it from the original Office 2000 CD, and recently I installed it on Vista so that I could continue to have quick access to the huge number of tools I use. Interestingly, I noticed today that starting Netbeans 6.0 from the Shortcut Bar caused the IDE to enter XP compatibility mode. The Aero style was gone, including the transparent title bars. I don’t mind that. I don’t even mind the warnings that Vista gives to say that it has adjusted the colour scheme because of a problem (with Java, it claims, because it can’t see beyond the JVM). What I do mind is the fact that Netbeans can’t open file dialog boxes in compatibility mode. That’s a bit of a problem, you understand.
Starting Netbeans from the Vista Start menu, or a shortcut on the desktop works fine. I tried to fool the Shortcut Bar into using nb.exe or a CMD file of my own to start Netbeans, but no luck. So for now my Netbeans button on the Shortcut Bar will simply open a text box to remind me to start the IDE from the Start menu instead.
Update: 8 Feb 2008
I discovered the cause of this issue. Installation of the toolbar resulted in OSA9.EXE being executed in XP compatibility mode. I removed the compatibility setting and it appears to work fine. No more loss of Aero.
Categorised as: Uncategorized