A fix for one person that had problems with OneNote screen clipping

The old OneNote Discussion Group got migrated to a social group over on MSDN. This thread started a few weeks ago: https://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/addonenote/thread/d0553155-485e-42d1-a79b-d2e2a3a1a585 The gist of it was that sometimes when using the OneNote Screen Clipper, the screen would go all white and the clipping inserted into OneNote would be solid black.

Similar reports had come up a few times in the past and I wanted to get more information about what could be causing this. As a tester, it is always frustrating to sign off on a feature (like screen clipping) and then get bug reports on it. In this case, "Stylonorus" took me up on my request for more information via email and pitched in a hand. I had suspected this had something to do with video card drivers and I wanted to find out if he had the latest drivers for his card installed. There are a few places in Windows to check, but the easiest to use in email is the log file from "msinfo32.exe." This is a utility included in all versions of Windows and does a good job of polling the system and generating a log file.

He emailed me the log file (expect it to be about 2MB if you save it yourself) and I looked at the Display properties under Components. Here's what I saw:

clip_image001

This was interesting to me since the video drivers for the Nvidia Quadro video card were being used along with a "LogMeIn Mirror Driver." I had no idea what LogMeIn was, so off to bing to check it out. They have a product that lets you log into your machine from any other client which is also running the LogMeIn software. Pretty slick - kind of like Mesh (www.livemesh.com) – which is what I use. Anyway, since they were installing a video driver along with the Nvidia driver I wanted to see if this driver could be the culprit. Looking around their support group, I saw this post about other problems folks were having with Nvidia drivers - https://community.logmein.com/t5/User-to-User-Support/Mirror-Driver-Issue/m-p/12741/highlight/true#M7390. They give instructions there about how to install LogMeIn without the mirror driver.

Stylonorus confirmed that uninstalling the mirror driver did in fact allow screen clipping to work normally.

So if you are using LogMeIn, this may help you. Even if not and are experiencing problems related to video (of which OneNote Screen Clipping may be an example), then take a look at MSInfo32.exe to see if you have up to date video drivers, or if some other application is installing video drivers as well.

I hope this helps!

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John