Hi,
I have been having problems with Fences for a long time and I was also having a lot of problems with Windows Explorer hanging. Finally figured out that I could work around that by killing and restarting Explorer but there is apparently something wrong causing a conflict somewhere. There is also the other problem of Fences sometimes crashing on start up and giving a message that there was an error and that I needed to enable or re-enable Fences.
I can assure you that it is not the computer as it happens on different computers and it is not something kludged up in Windows as I have installed and reinstalled Windows several times over the past year+. I really like Fences but I'm almost to the point of just creating a bunce of folders by category and putting all desktop icons in folders. Not as slick or pretty and not many options but probably trouble free. Or I have thought of looking for a menu driven program and assigning program (shortcuts) to menu items, but that would be so much like the start menu that I use that it wouldn't be very convenient... but on the other hand if I did that I would have a completely uncluttered desktop.
Finally there is one feature that Fences could use is the ability to nest a fence within a fence. Say you have a fence for all utilities... it would be great if within that fence you could have your other utility fences (say, system utilities, file utilities, uninstall utilities, driver utilities, etc.) instead of having several fences... one for each subcategory. Finally, as a thought, maybe as an option you could have a fence be a menu. Click on a fence and up pops a menu with submenus by category. Then the user could choose the type of fence they wanted based on their individual preferences.
No fault of Fences, but these types of options should be built into the OS and users should have a lot more control over the UI and especially without having to dig through an archaic system where finding a given setting is seldom intuitive but requires digging through different settings groups and finding the almost hidden options that take care of some issues.
Anyway if you find out a solution to any of the above it would be great. I haven't bothered to update my subscription lately as very little (if anything) has changed and the problems haven't changed either... so I have no real incentive to update. I tried several of the other utilities (like Groupy) and found it conflicted with other programs and had to uninstall it. So I'm getting to the "less is more" conclusion with Windows.
Sorry about the long post. Just had a lot to say.
Thanks