You know the new windows menu screen that appears when we click the windows keyword? I’ve realize this window is unable to be captured with image exist, we can not do click over the squares into the dashboard that appears, etc.
I’m putting this on forum because one of my robot are openning this screen and then is imposible to close it. The robot can find some thing that needs to find because of that windows so i’ve tried to change a little bit the robot to verify if there is some error by this reason(Very dificult to know if this window is open, I can not find a way by now) and make a win+D. But it doesn’t work.
Let me know if there is some ways to capture this window and makes clicks over it.
If you sure the error caused by the start window at the specific activity, have you try using “Try-Catch” activity to catch the error and then add the send ‘win’ hotkey for recovery.
Thank you for our answer. But for now I can not find the way to verify the moment where the robot opens the Sart window menu. For now I have two sequence into 2 try catch activities, so if the robot catch an error it will try win+d (If I use just win and the error is for other reason, the Start window will appear)
For now win+d doesn’t work. The only thing is working for me is click Start icon with simulate click but if the error is other, this just will open the Start menu and mess it up.
I am also facing similar issue, when any process is executed from Orchestrator it gets failed due to Windows start menu getting opened , not sure what triggers opening of start menu but once it is open then no click action works and it throws time out exception. I don’t have idea about at what point the windows start menu gets opened. When the same process is executed from Studio this issue doesn’t happen. The same processes works from Orchestrator itself after, i log in to server with the user account used by Orchestrator, close the start menu and then try the same processes from Orchestrator. Only once in a day i need to login to server and close the windows start menu, after that all processes gets executed in that day. But the next day the same issue occurs and i have to log in to server to close the windows start menu window.
Does the login attempt made by Orchestrator on a new day trigger opening of the windows start menu list ?
Why does no click or send hotkey actions (except ‘win’ hot key ) work when the windows start menu is open ?
Does the login attempt made by Orchestrator on a new day trigger opening of the windows start menu list ?
I think it doesn’t. The Orchestrator probably use remote login to connect to your machine.
You should put writeln or log at each step before the error happened, for tracing. i don’t know if there are activities that trigger to open windows start menu.
Why does no click or send hotkey actions (except ‘win’ hot key ) work when the windows start menu is open ?
i just realize, after try it.
Maybe @ovi or @loginerror can explain why UiPath cannot interacted with element inside windows start menu.
The issue has already been reported and hopefully will be fixed at one point.
If it is an enterprise scenario, I would definitely make a ticket with our support.
Could you let us know why exactly does the Orchestrator job fail due to the menu being open? What is the error message?
Is it related to your particular process and some action that is blocked by the Start menu being open?
Thanks for informing that the issue is being noted.
In my case the issue is in Production server using enterprise version of 2018.2.3 so as you told we have created a ticket.
The exception we get is as below:
UiPath.Core.ElementOperationException: Timeout reached. —> System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: Timeout reached. at UiPath.UiNodeClass.BringIntoView()
at UiPath.Core.UiElement.BringToForeground()
— End of inner exception stack trace —
at UiPath.Core.Activities.ScopeActivity.OnFaulted(NativeActivityFaultContext faultContext, Exception propagatedException, ActivityInstance propagatedFrom) at System.Activities.Runtime.FaultCallbackWrapper.Invoke(NativeActivityFaultContext faultContext, Exception propagatedException, ActivityInstance propagatedFrom) at System.Activities.Runtime.FaultCallbackWrapper.FaultWorkItem.Execute(ActivityExecutor executor, BookmarkManager bookmarkManager)
This error gets thrown when the process tries to interact with the excel file ( with click or shortcut key) and every time this exception is thrown from the screenshot we can see that at that point of time the windows start menu is being open somehow. When we manually log in to the server after the error then also we can see that the windows start menu staying open on top of excel files.
The click activities on excel file is inside an Attach window and we are also using maximize window and show window activities but still the interaction don’t happen with excel file when start menu is open. Tried adding win + d shortcut key to make sure nothing stays in top before we start the excel interaction but win +d don’t go to desktop when the start menu is open.
Hope will get support from the support team for the ticket created for the same. Posted this issue here so that if anyone else faced similar issue they can share their experience about workaround or fix.
Thanks for the suggestions. esc hotkey (with special key checkbox checked) works as a workaround for closing the start menu if open. If the start menu was open this will close it. If the start menu was not open then this would not open it.
After interacting with UiPath support team by raising ticket found the possibility for start menu to stay open. Windows start menu will be stayed open (when we log in next time) if we had manually used start menu to switch user or sleep the system. This could be the case for me as client IT team have been getting to server for some works.
However still waiting for the response on how to handle the below issues
UiPath is unable to interact with windows start menu
UiPath is unable to click on any application and would throw ‘timeout reached’ exception when the start menu is open even though our application window is the active maximized window.
Hi, i have this problem with enterprise 2019.4.2 and even simple browser selectors cant find the elements when windows menu is on top, nothing is working for me, inside the open browser, i tried send hotkey with sendwindowmessages but none works, do i have to use some special element as target?
Unfortunately, the open START menu when you schedule a process on an already logged-in user with a locked session is normal behaviour.
However, if you schedule a process from Orchestrator on a machine with all users logged-out, then that new session will not have the START menu open
And for anyone with Community Edition - you are not left alone either! Since we’ve launched the cloud.uipath.com, you now get multiple types of robots for free, which also includes 1 unattended one. On top of it, you can now download the .MSI installer to be able to install the Robot process on your target machine that will finally allow you to schedule an unattended process from Orchestrator when all users are logged out This was previous not possible because the Robot service of the Community .exe installer was only active when user was logged in to the account
I’m afraid the Windows Start menu on the lock screen is not something that can easily be worked around.
However, this should not be an issue for Enterprise edition which works with Orchestrator.
Another way to successfully run unattended automation would be to have a VM on which you start a session, disconnect yourself (not log out → the user should stay logged in) and then block the machine from locking the screen.
Log out the user from the machine was the solution.
But it took me some time because i thought this was already the case. When working with orchestrator i nomally always log out the robot user.
uploads transactions to an orchestrator queue fine. Logs into a locked Azure VM does what it needs to perfect.
The second using a ref framework logs in and tries to start but all items become retrys. Login to the VM and the start menu is active, close that down and it will switch to the browser and continue fine while im watching it,
Anyone got any fixes for this yet, I have messed around with it ost of the day to no avail
Hi everyone, in order to close the StartMenu of the Windows, I successfully did that using 2 SendHotkey activities:
first, will just send the “Win” key to the Desktop (at the selector you need to use the desktop)
second, send the same “Win” key but without anything on the selector (leave empty)
Set both of them to ContinueOnError=true in order to deal with both situations (already opened StartMenu, closed StartMenu) without having an exception if the menu isn’t open.
Set Timeout=1000 (1s) for both in order to have them responding without waiting a very long time.
This was tested on WinServer2019 and Win10Pro successfully.
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