Dismissed reminders returned

[Boopsie200]

I turned off my computer during a storm; at the time, I had 3 pop-up reminders showing. When I turned the computer on again, there were 8 reminders, 5 of which had been previously dismissed over the past 4 or 5 days. One was a bill payment, for which I distinctly remember adding the date paid and amount in the description, but that information is not there now. Two of the reminders were from recurring events, three were not. I'm using Pro 7.0.2. Help

[VueSoft]

I believe the problem is due to VueMinder Calendar not having enough time to save its data before Windows is shutdown. There was also a bug discovered with the autosave feature not working. This has been corrected for the next release (7.1.0), so the data will automatically save within 8 seconds of being changed. This release should be available within a week.

In the meantime, to prevent this from happening again, please right-click the VueMinder Calendar task tray icon and select "Exit" prior to shutting down Windows. This will ensure the program correctly saves all the latest changes, including reminders being dismissed, before it is closed.

[VueSoft]

Version 7.1.0 has been released. The autosave feature is been fixed. Any changes will be automatically saved within 8 seconds of a change.

[Boopsie200]

I'm still having the same problem. My computer turned itself off for some reason (not a power glitch). When it was up and running again, I had four pop-up reminders for events from May 21 through 29 which had been dismissed. I double-checked that "Don't show reminders for completed events" is checked. I double-checked that I am using 7.1.0. I double-checked that "Perform automatic daily back-ups" is checked and that my back-up file (CalendarInfo.bin) was modified at 1:00 a.m. 5/31/10. Can you think of anything else I should check? Am I the only one with this problem?

[VueSoft]

Hmmm, that's odd. I haven't seen this behavior in 7.1.0, but I'll keep an eye out for it. Did you have other reminders dismissed that didn't reappear? Is there anything "different" about the 4 reminders that did reappear? Are they in a shared calendar, synced with Google or Outlook, or anything else that might be different? Maybe there's something related to event/reminder syncing that is causing the reminders to reappear. I'll run some more tests to see if I can repeat this problem.

[Boopsie200]

I tried to do some detective work based on your questions. I do not do any synchronizing with other calendars

In the process of working on this, I noticed a couple of events that were not marked completed, but were not showing in the pop-up reminder window; in the event window, the check marks were still present for pop-up reminders. Today I noticed a completely missed reminder, an event for June 3 that should have had a pop-up on May 27.

Screen shot of "Event" window shows check mark by "pop-up reminder" and no check mark by "completed"

Screen shot2 VueMinder.jpg (159.62 KiB) Viewed 20354 times

Screen shot of "Recent Reminders" shows no reminder for the June 3 event BOPP report. Also note the June 14 reminder listed between April and May.

Screen shot1 VueMinder.jpg (214.56 KiB) Viewed 20354 times

I'm sure the June 14 event is one that I changed the date on because the doctor's office called me on the original appointment date and rescheduled. It's quite possible that a change in date is what my problem events have in common (those that either have missed reminders or have had reminders pop up after being dismissed). SHOULD I BE ABLE JUST TO CHANGE THE DATE or do I have to delete the event (including recurring events) and start over to get it to work correctly? Thanks for your help.

[VueSoft]

Thanks for the information. When you hover the mouse over an event that didn't show a reminder, what does the reminder status say in the tooltip? Does it list the time when the reminder will be (or should have been) displayed? There might be some additional clues there, that will help me piece together why you're seeing this behavior.

[Boopsie200]

I'm going to include a couple more screen shots: First one shows tool tip with no reminder info. After taking that shot, I opened the event, saw that the reminders were set in the Action column, then clicked on OK. The second screen shot shows the reminders will be sent one minute later.

I hope this gives you another clue. In the meantime, I am deleting events on which I have changed dates (or may have changed dates, since I can't remember all of what's happened!) I'll start from scratch on those.

ScreenShot3.jpg (91.19 KiB) Viewed 20342 times

ScreenShot4.jpg (103.13 KiB) Viewed 20342 times

P.S. I would have answered sooner but I didn't receive the usual e-mail to tell me I had a reply. My check mark is still there under Notify me when a reply is posted. Just decided to check in anyway. COMPUTERS!

[VueSoft]

Thanks for the screenshots. Regarding the second screenshot, do the times indicating when the reminder will be displayed/sent change every minute to say it will happen in the next minute, or does re-enabling the reminder cause it to be correctly processed? In other words, after 11:37 AM came and went, did the tooltip update to say the reminder was sent, or did it change to say the reminder would be sent at 11:38 AM?

One other thing I just thought of... Are you getting the popup reminder and then dismissing it? Doing this could prevent the email reminder from being sent if the Reminder Option to not process reminders for completed events is enabled. Could you try unchecking both "Automatically mark an event as completed when its reminder is dismissed" and "Don't show reminder for completed events" in the Reminder Options window, and let me know if that makes any difference to what you're seeing?

Also, it's possible there's a bug related to having both the popup reminder AND email reminder enabled. Could you try defining events with one reminder type or the other (not both), and see if those reminders are consistently processed when expected? If so, there could be an intermittent bug related to having multiple reminder actions enabled, something I haven't seen before.

[Boopsie200]

Shortly after I took those screen shots this morning, the reminder popped up AND I received the e-mail. Then I dismissed the event on the pop-up window. The tool tip for that event currently shows "reminder dismissed" and "email reminder sent . . . " just like it's supposed to.

HOWEVER, I used the "recent reminders" screen to find an old event that was not showing as dismissed. On 5/14/10 there is an event which is NOT marked complete but IS checked for a pop-up reminder. Okay, I opened the event editor again and clicked OK. The reminder popped up showing 3.5 weeks overdue. Now I can answer your first question: Yes, the time in the tool tip for when the reminder will pop up is changing each minute! I don't remember having a reminder failure at that time and I would certainly have dismissed that reminder after the appointment was over -- so now I don't know why it was sitting there not marked "complete." Also, I had NOT used an e-mail reminder for that one. It was not a recurring event. It also was not an event for which I had changed the date in event editor

I only use e-mail reminders on a few events and have not been aware of a failure there. Also, I don't dismiss pop-ups before an e-mail could be sent--I'm right much of a procrastinator so most of the time I'm leaving the reminder there (pop-up screen minimized) for a few hours or a few days.

I looked back in the forum and found my old posts; I had the problem with missed reminders last August, apparently it was fixed by version 5.2.0; then I had the problem again in December after updating to 6.0.1. You will note that this thread started because dismissed reminders were popping up again, and then while trying to do the detective work, I discovered a missed reminder.