filmscanners: Vuescan crop box goes mad. Film at 11

["Rob Geraghty" <harper@wordweb.com>]

I have no idea why, but Vuescan's crop box has gone loopy on me.  I'm using
7.0.21.  I've been attempting to scan some frames of 35mm colour neg film
using the motorised film strip adapter in my Nikon LS30.  I've been using
the zoom function in Vuescan to adjust the edges to include the maximum
amount of the image without going over the edge of it.  For the first couple
of strips of film, this was fine, but the crop box now won't behave at all.
Here's a summary of what it's doing;

1) If I click in the middle of the crop box and try to drag the box, the top
edge of the crop box jumps down to where the cursor is and tries to drag the
top of the box.  Before clicking, the cursor looks like a hand.  After, it
looks like a corner drag arrow.

2) If I try to drag the left edge of the crop box, pointing at the edge
changes the cursor to a left-right arrow, but clicking and dragging makes
the top of the crop box jump down again as above.

3) If I try to drag the bottom edge up, the top jumps down again as above.

4) If I try to drag the right hand edge, same thing.

5) At one point I was able to drag the top edge up, but every time I went
back to the preview tab, the top edge bounced back down a couple of mm.
This lost me about the top 1/5 of the image.

As a result, I can't use the mouse to set the crop box at all.  Thinking
something may have gone screwy in the INI file, I deleted it, and
soft-rebooted the computer to ensure there was no previous remnant of the
program in memory.  The behaviour hasn't changed.  I've managed to get the
crop box maximised by manually adjusting the measurements in mm in the crop
tab, then looking back at the preview tab.  This was initially confusing
because with a normal landscape image, the "x" and "y" values are reversed -
ie. x is the vertical measurement on the screen and y is the horizontal.  To
Vuescan, a portrait layout is "no" rotation, so most photos require left or
right rotation, and afterward the relationship of x and y gets confusing.
Part of the problem seemed to be caused by large xy offsets.  I had to
experiment with reducing the offsets before I could get the crop box right.
I'm not sure how consistently the offset values behave - with the image
rotated to the right, the offsets seem to be from the top and right edges so
in portrait they would be from the left (x) and top (y)?

Zooming doesn't seem to help.  Also I've noticed that when zoomed it doesn't
seem to be possible to see the bottom edge of the crop area.  The bottom
edge of the crop box can't be seen with a full 35mm frame zoomed.

One small unrelated suggestion for vuescan; I would personally find it handy
if the final output display (the "scan" tab) was shown immediately *before*
writing the crop to disk.  As it is, I have to sit around for ages before I
get to see what the final crop actually looks like, instead I'm looking at
the previous scan.

Has anyone else experienced this strange behaviour of the crop box, or is it
only me?  Does anyone have any idea how to stop it?

Rob

PS Another misbehaviour of my PC *seems* to be related to Vuescan.  After
using Vuescan and closing it, an amount of about 20MB of RAM doesn't seem to
be freed.  More importantly, Win98SE won't shut down and switch the computer
off.  Instead it hangs at the "Your computer is shutting down" splash
screen.  On reboot (requiring power off or hard reset) the computer
bluescreens with a 0E error just at the point where the desktop comes up.
Hitting enter to close the program (god knows *which*), the dekstop comes up
OK.  If I restart (using shutdown/restart) at this point, the computer
restarts normally without the bluescreen.  If I shutdown instead, it shuts
down and switches off.  I was wondering what was triggering the bluescreen
as it seemed random, but I'm now convinced it's something about Vuescan's
use of memory.