Flash Lockdown

In a DIRECT-L post Tuesday (titled “FlashMX2004 List + DMX2004 = FREEZE”), John Mathis of Inplicity documents 11 steps to lock up Director on Windows:

1. Open Flash MX2004, create a new flash document.
2. Drag a List component out a List component.
3. Populate the List component manually with 5-6 items.
4. Adjust the size of the List box. Just make it a bit bigger.
5. Export a SWF file.
6. Open Director MX2004…create a new movie.
7. Import the test swf file & place it on the stage.
8. Play the movie. Click line items & observe that it works fine.
9. Stop the movie, and set the sprite to Background Transparent.
10. Play the movie.
11. Click line items and the system becomes unresponsive.

John’s results were on a Windows XP system. I was able to reproduce on Windows 2000 Server in both authoring and in a projector. Bizarrely — considering the Flash playback issues on the Mac in general — OS X seems unaffected.