Barq's,
Coming back to the forum after a long absence, I was sorry to read that you were still having problems with the screensaver.
As you know from experience, troubleshooting something that only fails after running for many days, can be a tough mission.
Trying to think of a reason that it would run overnight fine, but fail later in the week, I considered the possibility that the program might have a small memory leak which -- after running for many days -- eventually consumed all available memory, causing the system to hang.
But that does not seem to be the case. As I write this, I've had the screensaver running in a window for nine days, and it is using no more memory now than it was on the first day it was running. Once it displayed all of the images in the directory, there was no further significant increase in memory use by the screensaver. (Actually, it didn't necessarily need to display
all of the images: once it had displayed the one image that caused it to use the most memory (which was not necessarily the largest image file) memory use did not grow significantly.) Oh, it might occasionally jump up or down a few megabytes, but would eventually return to about the same as it was at first.
I looked at all three processes: the process that is always running in the background waiting to start the screensaver (scr.pbas), the module that calls the slideshow program (mod_slideshow.pbas), and the slideshow process itself (slideshow.bin).
Granted, running it in a window, as I did, is not the same as running it full-screen. It is certainly possible that there is a bug that will only raise its nasty head when run full-screen. But the odds of that, while not impossible, are probably slim. Naturally, I did not want to give up using my computer for a week just to test this in full-screen mode.
Anyway, it seems that we can probably rule out a memory leak.
Perhaps you have a very large number of images? When you tested it overnight, was that long enough for it to display all of the images? If not, perhaps there is one image that is very large and complex that pushed the memory use beyond the limit of available memory. I think that is unlikely, but I am running out of ideas. If I remember correctly, you only have 128 MB in that machine. That should be more than enough for a computer that isn't doing anything else except displaying simple images, but perhaps you have a few humongous images in the mix, or possibly one or more corrupt image files. As I said, I'm running out of ideas here.
So if your overnight test did not test all of the images, you might want to reduce the number of images to just a few known good ones, and test it that way to see if it will keep running for a week.
Since the screensaver will run overnight for you, and is still running for me after nine days, I suspect it is more likely that something else is causing your system to hang. It could be some other process, or even a hardware problem. Perhaps your machine is sensitive to temperature variations? Is the church office heated during the week?
I would suggest testing it at home for a week, where you have more control of its environment and can be sure that no one else is interfering with the test during the week. Also, if you haven't already done so, try shutting down other applications such as browsers (this forum has countless tales of buggy browsers).
Anyway, I realize that by now you may have gotten tired of pulling your hair out, and may have thrown in the towel while you still have hair left. But if you are still working on this project, good luck!
And Happy New Year.
npierce
P.S. I noticed that the server where I previously found the SDL pet has vanished. If anyone needs it, an alternative location is
http://dotpups.de/dotpups/Games/SDL-1.2.9.pet.