2019-05-10 22:36:26

I was taking my test at a university and they provided a computer with NVDA. It was a very new desktop running windows 10 and mostly did not cause problems.
I was happily taking my test which was 10 essay questions! I had just finished and poof!!
The computer freezes, after a while the tech support was called and they were able to fix the issue and use the recovery thing word to get my awesome test back!
We never knew what went wrong but we found that NVDA was running twice, how is this possible.
They went in to the task manager and told me that NVDA had three instances going on at the same time.
First of all how can this happen and how does it? Would this cause a computer to freeze like a boss or not! How can NVDA be improved so that it detects when more than one instance is running at the same time.
Have any of you had this happen before?
Help is well appreciated.
Thank you.

2019-05-10 23:30:45

It doesn't run more instances at once. It has multiple processes communicating with each other, but there is only one NVDA instance. Them not knowing that, I can see how they might reach that conclusion, but there is only ever one NVDA instance running at any one time.

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2019-05-11 00:03:52

I doubt it was NVDA. There is only one instance of NVDA; loading another instance will either restart NVDA or pop up the NVDA menu.

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2019-05-11 00:46:03

It is actually possible to have 2 NVDA instances at once. However, I think that you have to launch the second one with special arguments, and in that case you would hear double speech.

2019-05-11 05:47:07

The shortcut to start NVDA has the -r option, which replaces the current instance. As far as I know it was only possible to have multiple instances running in very early revisions, I tried to start multiple instances just now and nothing happened.

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2019-05-11 10:56:36

It's possible to start more instances in really specific conditions.
I don't know how to reproduce that bug, however

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2019-05-13 02:37:36

You can have several instances showing in the system tray, portable vers is my guess.
The only way that i know of to launch two NVDA processes at the same time is portable vers, and that may even exit the current copy.

2019-05-13 06:22:55

I don't think that's multiple at once, Basically if NVDA crashes, it doesn't take it's system tray icons with it, so you get a bunch of dead icons in the system tray. You can click on them and they will die. I have never seen 2 copies of NVDA running at the same time, I don't even know how it would be possible. That would just cause so many issues, for example keyboard hooking, both trying to write to the same logfiles and config files at the same time, etc.

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2019-05-13 09:27:47

I use a program called sys tray refresh to get rid of the dead icons automatically.