Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

Bad experiences with SuperEdi

Hi there,

I was told that SuperEdi is good and worth trying. So I downloaded and installed a copy on my Win2000 2 weeks ago. Since then, I had encountered abnormal behaviors of my Windows:

[1]

Whenever an office application is executed, an error message pops up:

"Cannot find the file '(null)' (or one of his components). Make sure the path and filename are correct and that all required libraries are available."

This happens in all the office pplications : Excel, Word, Access, Powerpoint, Publisher, PhotoEditor;

But not in other MS products : NotePad, WordPad, Paint, Imaging.

It DIDN'T happen when I clicked on an office document like : mybook.xls.

[2]

I use Excel VBA quite often. When a VBA code is excuted and an error encountered with an error message displayed by Excel VBA, there's a button [help] that will bring up the "VBA help" if clicked.

After I installed SuperEdi, a click to that [help] button didn't bring up the VBA help, but instead an instance of SuperEdi was opened, which loads a executable file (named something like ???help.exe) into the SuperEdi edit window.

[3]

I am using Outlook. When an email with several *.jpg files is received, and I click on one of the attached jpgs, that file is open by MS PhotoEditor. After I view that jpg in PhotoEditor and return to Outlook, an error message showing up:

"Cannot find the file specified"

I have to click on the [ok] button in order to proceed.

[4]

I configured my Windows2000 (professional version) to read and write Chinese characters. When a text file with Chinese characters was opened by SuperEdi, all the Chinese characters in one line will be displayed at the same location, meaning that for each line if there are Chinese characters, they will all overlap onto each other.

The above [1]~[3] strange behaviors were gone right after I uninstalled the SuperEdi, proving that it's the SuperEdi which causes those problems.

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

oops, my name is "runsun", not "Bad experiences with SuperEdi"

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

I just tested the SuperEdi in my home computer for the problem [1] mentioned above. It is "repeatable" -- SuperEdi installed on my home computer caused the same problem [1].

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

Hm, I never heared about such things. Can you please tell me which version of MS Office you were using?
Which language version of Windows 2000 do you have installed and what did you select in the Regional Options control panel?

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

I do believe the problems I encountered are probably case-specific, otherwise you guys would have solved it long time ago.

The settings in my computer :

Office: Office 2000 (9.0.2812)
Windows 2000 Professional Regional settings:

Your Locale (location): Chinese(Taiwan)
Sorting Order: Bopomofo
Language setting for the system:
Default to "Traditional Chinese(Taiwan)"

When I tried to open the Office applications to see their versions just now, I found another problem [5] :

If I have the SuperEdi open and running when I try to execute any Office application, that Office application (an .exe file!!) will be opened by the SuperEdi instead and displayed in its edit panel as some scrambled symbols.

Again, this only happened when I click on the Excel.exe icon to run it. If I click on any Excel file ???.xls, it runs normally.

Obviously in my computer the SuperEdi somehow intercepts the application execution and file opening process of all Office 2000 applications.

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

Oh by the way, my Windows 2000 Professional is an English version (5.00.2195).

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

Ok, using a fresh installation of Windows 2000 I found what causes these problems.

It has something to do with the "Add to Explorer context menu" installation option, which creates the "Open with SuperEdi" menu item in Windows Explorer. When you re-install SuperEdi without this option, the Office applications will behave normally.

I didn't discover this problem myself, because I am using another Explorer extension, which appears to fix this strange behaviour.

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

I tried to re-install the SuperEdi with the option you mentioned, but a message came up:

============================================
Setup has detected that the following components are already insstalled on your computer:

Add to Explorer context menu

Deselecting these components will not uninstall them.

Would you like to continue anyway ???
============================================

I did go ahead to "continue anyway", and the problems I encountered appeared again. Obviously, a simple "re-installation" can't solve the problem.

I am certainly not gonna wipe out and re-install my entire Windows and all installed applications just for using this program. So, unless one solution is given, I will have to give up using it.

Thx for the effort.

Just curious : What Explorer extension you used which prevented those bugs coming up in your system ?

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

With "re-install" I meant uninstall SuperEdi and install it again. Alternately you can manually delete the following key in the Registry: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\SuperEdi.

Btw.: the other Explorer extension is CopyPath, which allows you to copy the full path name of a selected file or directory to the clipboard. You can get it from
https://www.wolosoft.com/files/CopyPath.zip

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

There's no "SuperEdi" item in my "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell" listed in the Regedit.

Besides, why the regestry item like that is not removed by the uninstall program ?

Now I have encountered another problem, even after I uninstalled the SuperEdi:

[6]

When I browsed a webpage and was trying to view the source (by right-clicking on the page and choose "view source"), the IE tried to load SuperEdi and said it couldn't find it.

Obviously, even after the SuperEdi was uninstalled, it is still integrated into IE as it's default HTML editor.

An attempt to re-set the [HTML editor] setting to "Notepad.exe" via the IE menu [Tools/Internet Option/Programs] failed to revert the default editor to Notepad.

This didn't happened in my first intallation of the SuperEdi in which the "Open with SuperEdi" menu item was checked.

Thx for the info. of CopyPath.

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

Ok, I have manually deleted all the SuperEdi related items in my Registry. Then I re-installed it again, with the following options unchecked:

[] Registry as HTML editor
[] Add to Explorer context menu
[] German language support
[] Spanish language support

and most of the problems were solved except:

[3] With the Outlook (I can't check it now but I believe it is solved too)

and

[4] The display of chinese characters which shows two types of problems:

a. With some fonts like "Courier", "Courier New" .. a line of chinese characters with "negative character spacing" -- one character is about 20% overlapping with the character next to it.

b. With some fonts like "Fixday", "Terminal", "明細體", etc, the character spacing is way too large (about one character wide), making the characters of entire file widely spread and thus prevent eazy reading.

Overall, there's a serious problem on the calculation of "character spacing" which made this software impractical with chinese character displaying -- Or, to be fair, I should say, impractical if users have the same software settings as I have.

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

As far as I know, the unistall program removes all entries that were made during the installation. Anyway, if you want to select another editor for "View source" you can change the registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\View Source Editor\Editor Name

To fix the character spacing problem, I think I will need your assistance, because I don't understand Chinese. I don't even know if it is possible to use chinese characters with fixed-width fonts. If you want to help me with that issue, please contact me in a private mail.

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

I HAVE INSTALLED (DOWNLOADED SUPER ED AND WHEN I USE IT TO EDIT AN EXISTING TEXT FILE ALL OF FIRST THE LETTERS OF EVERY LINE ARE MISSING.

WHATS WRONG? WHATS THE FIX?

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

I can only second all this mess.
I run w2k, sp3 and my system is absolutely clean and up to date. I work in the feature film industry and require a working system -- I develop tools and shaders for visual effects.
Since I installed SuperEdi, I recently get the mentioned "(null) driver" missing error message from various apps, IE and Mozilla open several file types (e.g. MP3) in SuperEdi instead of the displayed target app in the browser and the worst issue is that when editing a file for some time I can often, all of a sudden, not edit sudden lines or the cursor displays at a different position that where the text is actually inserted. Absolutely useless for any serious coding.
After trying dozens of freeware editors now, I'm finally back on emacs. Sad but true.

.mm

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

Moritz, please uninstall SuperEdi and re-install it without the option "Add to Explorer context menu". This will fix the problem with file associations.
The wrong cursor positioning is probably related to the word-wrap mode.

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

The wrong cursor stuff definitely has nothing to do with word wrap. I never work with word-wrap mode when coding. There are other behaviours like sometimes sudden lines can't be edited. Closing and re-opening the file helps but this is no way of working. I switched to emacs already. For people looking for an excellent GUI coding editor I suggest SciTe, based on 'scintilla', an open source editing component that supports syntax highlighting and folding (hint, hint).

.mm

Re: Terrible experiences with SuperEdi

Boy you guys scared me: I downloaded SuperEdi and began using it *beore* I read the forum :).

However, the luck of the Texans has held for me. I accidentally installed it with the registry and context menu features disabled. I don't run any of the Microscruffie Office stuff, or Outlook, and IE only veeerry seldom, so can't say whether they might have had problems, but there haven't been any OTHER problems as described above. All my programs appear so far to be working normally.

I may deinstall SuperEdi later, but only because it doesn't seem to offer needed features I don't already have in my old trusted tried-and-true, but it won't I think be because I had PROBLEMS with it.

Re: O Yeah, forgot to say...

Using WinME operating system, not 2000/NT... would that have anything to do with my lack of problems?? :)

Re: File Associations

[1], [2] and [3] are all caused by the Explorer context menu option. Finally I found a solution to this problem and I'm going to publish an updated version of SuperEdi in a few days.

Re: (null) error

funny how a small little free application could really screw you up like this. I was getting the cannot find null or one of its components error after installing this app. I would click start run, cmd, enter, and get the error..cant find cmd. Geez, cant find cmd!! Unfortunately I had to reformat my system since I had installed about 15 applications in one session and I couldn't figure out which one had screwed me up. I had no idea this application was responsible until my new format. Thank GOD for this forum.