NVDA hanging should never lock up the keyboard to allow for recovering via restarts

[Neurrone]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Do something that causes NVDA to reliably crash. For example, I can do this reliably by doing something that causes the command line to print a large amount of output. Its obviously not ideal that it crashes NVDA, but this is the most convenient way that I know of triggering this.

Actual behavior:

Controlling the computer via keyboard is impossible, so the only way to recover is a forced shutdown via the physical power button and a restart, losing all work.

Expected behavior:

Keyboard commands should still work, e.g windows+d, and navigating to NVDA and pressing enter.

System configuration

NVDA installed/portable/running from source:

Installed

NVDA version:

Latest alpha

Windows version:

Windows 10 1909

Name and version of other software in use when reproducing the issue:

Anything that causes NVDA to hang, in my case it was a docker container unexpectedly causing me to restart my computer.

Other information about your system:

Other questions

Does the issue still occur after restarting your computer?

Yes

Have you tried any other versions of NVDA? If so, please report their behaviors.

No

If addons are disabled, is your problem still occuring?

Irrelevant

Did you try to run the COM registry fixing tool in NVDA menu / tools?

No

[zahra21]

hi. i confirm this problem. i faced this issue several times, as i remember, especially since the time that nvda migrated to espeak ng. nvda 2017.1 was very great and i wish that i could use it forever! even if i used laptop several hours and opened several times in my firefox, nvda was very responsive in compare to other versions! when i installed 2017.2 for the first time, i opened firefox and firefox hanged and my laptop became completely unusable! i fourced shutdown my laptop via physical power button. in twelve days before now, i installed 2017.3, and firefox becomes unresponsive and nvda and keyboard hang too! i use firefox as my only web browser, i use windows xp 32bit service pack 3, my laptop has 2.5 gb of ram, 2 cores of cpu with 65 nm! 1.73 ghz. i dont use braille and now, since 2014, i only used espeak iven3 voice which is the best and most lovely voice in espeak!

[feerrenrut]

This should probably be thought of as an enhancement request rather than a bug report. The goal is to improve the user experience in the event of NVDA getting locked up. Unfortunately there are several ways this can happen, and likely require large changes to NVDA to improve the outcome.

[Neurrone]

@feerrenrut I disagree. Marking this as a UX enhancement trivializes the severity of the problem, and arguably NVDA hanging should not prevent any further keyboard usage. I understand that this won't be an easy problem to solve though, but marking this a bug would be more accurate.

[francipvb]

Hello,

What about migration to asyncio? This should solve a bunch of problems...

-- Cuando tus fuerzas terminan, las de mi Dios comienzan.

[LeonarddeR]

I have looked into a migration to asyncio, but that also requires asyncio support for wx and that's not currently there.

[zersiax]

I have to agree with @Neurrone here. This is a bug, this is a showstopper, this can cause people to lose their jobs. If this happens in the middle of an important consultation, or while you are working on something important that for whatever reason isn't autosaving, or a myriad of other factors, you will lose data. If you lose data on the job, that effectively means you lose money. If you lose money because of a screen reader, that screen reader cannot be used in a work setting. It really is as simple as that. I appreciate that this will require large changes on NVDA's side. I also think that this has happened often enough over the last years that these changes are warranted, especially after the python3 migration. If there are ways this can be mittigated, I feel that needs to be looked into. Not hearing "subject: blah" but rather " blah" for an email subject is a UX enhancement. This is a critical bug to those it happens to.

[LeonarddeR]

Related to #10247, #6463, #6291

[LeonarddeR]

I tend to agree with @zersiax here. The problem described here shouldn't be treated as an enhancement, but rather as a p2 issue. See also triage of issues mentioned above.