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When I run Snipping Tool from my start menu, no window appears. The process is running according to Task Manager. It is reproducible and not a stuck process because if I kill the current instance and restart it, the same problem occurs.

Since I sometimes have an external monitor attached to my laptop, I suspect that the tool's main window is being created outside the bounds of my active display. I'm aware of the usual method to deal with this: Focus the window, Alt+Space to call up its system menu, M for Move, press any arrow key to start moving, then move mouse. However I can't get this to work for Snipping Tool because it doesn't take focus at startup and doesn't appear in either the tray list of running applications or the Alt-Tab order.

Does anyone have any suggestions how to get my Snipping Tool back?

Failing that, are there some keyboard shortcuts so I could use it without actually being able to see it?

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2 Answers 2

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If you can get to the snipping tool settings, untick "Show screen overlay when snipping tool is active", this way you should be able to shift focus to it. Then to make a snip just click the New Snip button, you will get the snip cross hair but not the overlay.

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  • Ok, getting closer. I'm guessing I can't get to the settings even if there is a hotkey, because focus would be required yet again. Do you know if this setting is stored in the registry?
    – Ben Voigt
    Aug 30, 2010 at 16:01
  • Hmm, Process Monitor shows an attempt to read HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\TabletPC\Snipping Tool but it doesn't exist, suggesting I haven't run the tool before on this windows install. Maybe window position isn't actually the problem.
    – Ben Voigt
    Aug 30, 2010 at 16:08
  • Thanks for trying. The problem turned out to be something else entirely, a hangup in the Tablet PC Inking support layer caused by a driver bug I guess.
    – Ben Voigt
    Sep 13, 2010 at 18:38
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It turns out that this is caused when my laptop's touchscreen stops responding, and is not a window positioning problem at all.

A stack trace during the failure shows that it's hung in inkobj.dll trying to enumerate tablet resources. Someone else encountered the same failure (same stack trace from InkObj.dll!CInkTablets::get_Count(), same symptoms, different app) here. It affects both Snipping Tool and Paint.

Shtupid buggy touchscreen driver.

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