After working with OverviewCheck for quite some time, strange things started happening on my PC. Not only did the commands from OverviewCheck start behaving oddly, but the whole keyboard handling went out of whack. Didn't work in any program. I had to restart my machine to get things working again.

At first I thought it might be some kind of virus, but a complete viruscheck plus a run with Malwarebytes revealed nothing.

About ten years ago I had a somewhat similar problem in a telephone application that I had written for a customer. It worked fine for several hours, then suddenly it crashed. After much detective work from me and several colleagues it was determined that it was a memory overrun error in the WinForms button.

Unlike that situation, the current one doesn't end in a crash, but it does indicate that some internal table in Windows is being corrupted after a while. I can't be sure it's in the AutoIt component. I can't in fact say with 100% certainty that it's in OverviewCheck. But it sure looks like it.

I would like to know if any of you have experienced the same symptoms with either OverviewCheck or ProfilerQuery. I'll try to find a workaround, but it's tricky when it takes so long to trigger the problem. Worst case scenario, I might have to get back to the regular SendKeys, with the limitations that it will incur (no way to use the Access Keys using the Alt key, for one).

Quoting surfeur51:

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I have not noticed anything like that for now...

Good to know. Let me know if you do notice anything. Maybe it's a combination of things unique to my computer.

Quoting mediadogg:

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Could it be a a software generated "stuck" key? I had a case like that recently in another domain. The Control key had been pressed "Down", never officially handled and never followed up with a corresponding "Up". The PC went nuts. Maybe not your case, but it might trigger a thought.

Hm, that's interesting. That's something I have never seen, so it's not something I considered, but now that you mention it, it may just be what's happening.

I guess if that is indeed the case, a press of the offending key should "unstick" it? So it should be fairly easy to verify once the situation occurs again. That raises two follow-up questions:
1) Can this situation be detected in software?
2) If detected, can it be resolved in software?
Of course, a better question might be "Can it be prevented?"

Definitely food for thought. Many thanks for sharing, mediadiogg!

Problem solved!

I had an access key on the "Edit overview" button, so Alt-E would trigger that function. Since there is a delay in sending the commands, I could usually let go of the Alt button before the command was sent to Profiler. But if I still had Alt pressed when AutoIt sent an Alt command, the Alt key would get stuck.

So the solution for now is to avoid using Alt-E, just click the button. I will remove the access key from that button, and handle Alt-E on key up instead, which should avoid the problem.

Many thanks again, mediadogg! If you hadn't pointed me in the right direction I don't know how I would have found out what was going on.

Quoting mediadogg:

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Aw shucks. Warn't nuthin'. Every now and then I get lucky. Helping you is my great pleasure!

Well, friends who get lucky is the next best thing to getting lucky yourself! 

And I actually found that I didn't even have to remove the access key, I could still delay the processing until the Alt key was released. So it won't look any different. The only difference is that the command will be sent on key up instead of key down.

If I had a quarter for every time I had a problem that looked hopeless, but that turned out to be fairly easy once I got pointed in the right direction, why I could buy myself ... a Big Mac.