Text garbled running DOS program in WinXP

[jwgrahamjr]

Our company recently upgraded from Win98SE to WinXP. We were running DOS programs in Win98SE in either window mode or full screen with no problems.
In XP, the programs execute fine but after task-switching or using the DOS program for about 10 minutes, the text displayed in the DOS window becomes garbled and corrupted. Letters seem to be shifted (i.e. a becomes b, b becomes c, etc) or they just turn into Wingdings. If I quit the DOS program, close the DOS window and restart the DOS app, things work fine again for another 10 minutes or so the then the text gets screwed up again.

I tried running the DOS program in compatibility mode for Win95 and all the other OS's listed. I also tried altering the Display Settings for the executable to "Run in 256 colors", "Run in 640x480 screen resolution" and "Disable Visual Themes". I tried the so-called "Compatibility Wizard" to no avail. I am running in TrueColor, 1024x768 with a VisionTek Ti4600 card. I have the latest Detonator drivers for the vid card.

Any suggestions? We really need to be able to switch between the DOS apps and Windows apps...running from a DOS boot diskette works just fine.

 

[Snickle]

Interesting. I have a similar problem on several computers with Win2000 accessing [through serial port networking] a Unix-SCO server. The DOS-based program works fine from a floppy or in a Window but in a Full-screen display, we get a line across the monitor just fine but below it will be the bottom half of the line again. We can't get the window to be large enough to be usable. The office has to switch between the network display and a coding program and a word processor without closing any of them. WinXP doesn't have the problem.

Yours may be memory, have you checked the Properties of the shortcut or Command Prompt icon and the Memory tab?

 

[jwgrahamjr]

I have not altered any of the memory tab settings but I will give this a try.

I have had a problem similar to yours running a DOS program on a WinME machine. I played around in the font tab - I made the setting Bitmap Only and changed the font size to be smaller and the problem seemed to go away (in full screen mode) although the font looked compressed/smashed a bit and the "full" screen was about 75% of full size.

 

[jhoover]

We switched out some Win98 PCs with new XP machines and now are experiencing this same problem with an old Revelation-based application: Text characters become corrupted after the app has been running for a while in full screen mode. Although we tested it on XP first, and it seemed fine, we now realize that all tests were run in a window, not full-screen. If anyone has any further insights into this problem I'd love to hear about them.

Thanks,

John

 

[linney]

I saw something similar once when a faulty DOS program was somehow writing a logfile directly into the DOS.exe file that was running instead of the logfile.