Long delay after capture before image shows up

For some time now (maybe several months) I hear from some users of HyperSnap 6 that they experience a long delay after a screen capture, before the newly captured image shows up. The delay may last from 30 to 60 seconds, sometimes even longer. This seems to happen mostly on Windows 7 systems, maybe on Vista too. The issue is related to the "camera shutter" sound that HyperSnap makes by default upon screen capture.
 
One way to deal with this is simply to disable the sound - under "Capture" menu, "Capture Settings", on "Capture" tab, remove the check mark next to "Play Sound" option and click OK. Then try a screen capture again - it should now work without any delays.
 
Glenn - one of our long time users - did some poking on his system and found the reason. It seems to be a buggy Realtek sound card driver, trying to send the sound to "Realtek Digital Output", when nothing is connected there. The driver is probably waiting until some pre-set timeout elapses when it does not receive any response from digital speakers. Glenn found out that when he disabled "Realtek Digital Output" sound playback device, all works normally in HyperSnap 6, including the capture sound playback without delays. Here is how you can do this on Windows 7:

• Right-click the loudspeaker icon in the system tray (the volume control icon), and select "Playback Devices" from the menu that appears
• Review the list of devices listed there. If you don't see a "Digital Output" device, right-click the list and choose the option "Show Disconnected Devices". If you see the "Digital Output" device now, right-click it and choose "Disable".
• Click the "Apply" button in low right corner and try HyperSnap screen capture with sound enabled again to see if this fixes the long delay problem.

Again my sincere thanks to Glenn for his help in figuring out a solution to this problem, as the problem did not occur on any of my computers, so I was unable to debug it myself.
 
Greg

I have almost identical symptoms, but turning off the sound didn't help for me.  Occasionally it will work fine -- while writing this message, as a test I hit printscreen 5 times.  The first four times the Hypersnap window popped up instantly, and I hit escape to make it go away.  The fifth time I had wait for almost a minute.  I didn't do anything in between these trials -- just kept hitting Print Screen and Escape to trigger the problem. 
 
I'm running Windows 7 Professional x64 and Hypersnap 6.91.03.  Any ideas?

What is HyperSnap doing with screen captures? Did you turn on e.g. automatic saving to files, maybe to a network location which may be slow? I would have to review all the options under "Capture Settings", all tabs there, to suggest some possible solution. Maybe you could review these options yourself and notice something.
 
Greg

I tried to turn off as many things as I could earlier, but was still having the problem.  Now, after suspending the laptop at work and resuming it at home, I can't reproduce it any more!  I'm starting to think that this has something to do with stale network drives, even though I don't have auto-save turned on.  At work, I can't reach my home network drives and those were mapped.  I will see if I can reproduce the problem tomorrow and then fix it by deleting my drive mappings.
 
For reference, though, here is Capture Settings, Capture (thank you TextSnap!)
 
                        Delay time before the capture: 500            milliseconds
                               Auto-scroll refresh time:     20              milliseconds

                     Default background color for captures:                    Transparent
 X     Include cursor image
 X     Turn off font smoothing for capture
        Play sound when making the snapshot
 X     Hide this window before capturing screen
 X     Restore this window to front after a capture
        Enter full screen presentation mode after a capture
        Do automatic paste, print or save ONLY if a new capture
        is different from the previous one.
 X     Clear transparency for Window Captures under Vista

        Mark new captures as "modified" (to prompt for saving)
 
I also have "Replace image in the current window with the new capture" set and no auto-save.

The only thing I notice above that maybe could cause some delays, particularly when the computer is doing a lot of other things at once, is "turn off font smoothing..." If you notice the problem again, maybe you could un-check this option and see if it helps. Also rebooting the computer may help clear some weird state of the system and free some stale memory, maybe clamied by some processes and never properly released, even if no longer needed.
 
Greg

I have been experiencing this problem rather frequently. Are you doing anything to fix the code rather than suggesting to turn off features of HyperSnap, the OS or restarting? None of those suggestions are solutions, only workarounds. This thread has been viewed 2000+ times so it's obviously a problem for your customers. Version 6 never had this issue...

I don't know what I could fix in my code to work around a bug in some sound card driver code? My code is very simple, it says "Play this WAV sound" and the system should play it, or return instantly if it's unable to play. I have no means of knowing if any given system has a buggy sound driver... Here is again what you can do in your sound settings on Windows 7 - and please note that it is not "turning off an OS feature", but simply "disabling a faulty system component":

• Right-click the loudspeaker icon in the system tray (the volume control icon), and select "Playback Devices" from the menu that appears
• Review the list of devices listed there. If you don't see a "Digital Output" device, right-click the list and choose the option "Show Disconnected Devices". If you see the "Digital Output" device now, right-click it and choose "Disable".
• Click the "Apply" button in low right corner and try HyperSnap screen capture with sound enabled again to see if this fixes the long delay problem.

Greg