METHODS FOR AUTOMATICALLY LOCATING URL-CONTAINING OR OTHER...

Details METHODS FOR AUTOMATICALLY LOCATING URL-CONTAINING OR OTHER... METHODS FOR AUTOMATICALLY LOCATING URL-CONTAINING OR OTHER...

1999-11-10

2003-12-09

Beausoliel, Robert (Department: 2184)

Error detection/correction and fault detection/recovery

Data processing system error or fault handling

Reliability and availability

C714S038110

Reexamination Certificate

active

06662310

ABSTRACT:

This application was re-filed after May 29, 2000 and pursuant to 37 C.F.R. §1.53(d) to define a continued prosecution application (CPA) which continues from U.S. Ser. No. 09/438,135, filed Nov. 10, 1999.
BACKGROUND
1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to computer systems that concurrently execute plural application programs on a preemptive multitasking basis.
The invention is directed more specifically to multitasking systems wherein the execution of a given application program, and more specifically a network-browsing program or the like, may become frozen or may otherwise halt unexpectedly and for which it is desirable to revive the frozen/halted application program at least to a state which enables nonvolatile saving of work product produced so far by the frozen program. The invention is directed even more specifically to the problem of how to appropriately locate and save work product items of a just-froze browser program or the like so that a fresh copy of the program can be relaunched and made to automatically re-link with the just-saved work product.
2a. Cross Reference to Related Patents
The disclosures of the following U.S. patents are incorporated herein by reference:
(A) U.S. Pat. No. 5,911,060 issued Jun. 8, 1999 to Scott Elliott, and entitled, COMPUTER METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR UNFREEZING AN APPARENTLY FROZEN APPLICATION PROGRAM BEING EXECUTED UNDER CONTROL OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM; and
(B) U.S. Pat. No. 5,974,249 issued Oct. 26, 1999 to Scott Elliott et al, and entitled, ZERO FOOTPRINT METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR EXPANDING ALLOCATED MEMORY SPACE OF A PROCESS USING A VIRTUAL MEMORY AREA.
2b. Cross Reference to Co-pending Patent Applications
The disclosures of the following Co-pending, U.S. patent applications (each owned by the owner of the present application) are incorporated herein by reference:
(A) U.S. Ser. No. 08/938,204, filed Sep. 26, 1997, by inventor Scott Elliott, which application later issued as U.S. Pat. No. 6,009,258, entitled METHODS AND DEVICES FOR UNWINDING STACK OF FROZEN PROGRAM AND FOR RESTARTING THE PROGRAM FROM UNWOUND STATE;
(B) U.S. Ser. No. 09/275,171, filed Mar. 24, 1999 as a divisional of U.S. Ser. No. 08/937,629, filed Sep. 26, 1997 by inventor Scott Elliott, which application later issued as U.S. Pat. No. 6,151,569, entitled AUTOMATED SEQUENCE OF MACHINE-PERFORMED ATTEMPTS TO UNFREEZE AN APPARENTLY FROZEN APPLICATION PROGRAM; and
(C) U.S. Ser. No. 09/438,076, filed concurrently herewith by inventors Scott Elliott and Jeff Carr and originally entitled METHODS FOR AUTOMATICALLY LOCATING DATA-CONTAINING WINDOWS IN FROZEN APPLICATION PROGRAM AND SAVING CONTENTS.
2c. Copyright Notice
This application includes one or more listings of computer programs. The assignee of the present application claims certain copyrights in said computer program listings. The assignee has no objection, however, to the reproduction by others of these listings if such reproduction is for the sole purpose of studying it to understand the invention. The assignee reserves all other copyrights in said program listings including the right to reproduce the corresponding computer programs in machine executable form.
3. Description of Related Art
Multitasking computer systems may be characterized as those that allow multiple programs to execute in overlapping fashion so that it appears the programs are all running at the same time.
Preemptive multitasking systems may be characterized as those in which an operating system (OS) has supervisory control over the concurrently executing programs and the OS limits the length of time that each given application program has for using system resources such as a CPU (Central Processing Unit) or other data processing means.
Examples of preemptive multitasking OS's include Microsoft Windows95™, Microsoft Windows98™ and Microsoft Windows NT™, all of which are available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. These OS's also permit multi-threaded execution of programs. In multi-threaded execution, a program begins executing as a first, main thread and optionally generates ancillary threads that run concurrently and interact with one another through exchanges of semaphores.
During execution, a given application program, and more specifically a network-browsing program, may encounter an unexpected problem which halts its normal execution either in a main thread or an ancillary thread. Examples of causes for such problems include those in which: (a) the program attempts to access restricted (privileged) or unavailable areas of memory areas, (b) the program makes calls to unavailable system functions or services without the ability to handle such unavailability, (c) the program jumps into a nonsense stream of execution code, (d) the program invokes a no-time-out wait for an event that never happens, (e) the program enters into a deadlock embrace, and so forth. This is a nonexhaustive list of possible causes.
When such execution-halting events occur, artisans sometimes refer to the halted program as being ‘stuck’ or ‘frozen’ or ‘crashed’ or as having encountered a ‘fatal error’. Different flavors of these terms are sometimes associated to one class of cause as opposed to another. Here, the terminology ‘frozen application’ will be generically applied to any and all situations in which the user of a given application program reasonably believes the program is stuck and that this perceived state prevents saving of work product irrespective of the exact cause and irrespective of whether the user's belief is accurate in fact. Also herein, the terminology ‘recently-froze application’ will be generically applied to any and all application programs which meet the definition of having become frozen at least once in the past and of not having been fully revived or launched afresh.
The end-user (e.g., novice user) of a computer system typically doesn't care what the specific cause is that has led him or her to believe that they can no longer save work product. Such a user instead generally recognizes the ‘frozen’ condition as an apparently sudden or recent refusal by the given application program to respond appropriately to keyboard strokes or to mouse clicks or to other user interface interactions (which interactions can include voice commands, hand gestures, and so forth).
The presence of a frozen program does not generally pose a major problem to the overall operations of a preemptive multitasking system. In such systems, other, concurrently-executing application programs can continue to run in normal fashion even though a given application (e.g., the network-browser) has actually become frozen or has actually crashed (as opposed to situations where the program is fine and the user merely believes it has become stuck). The end-user continues to have access to operating system services and to the resources of non-frozen application programs. (For example, in a Windows95/98™ environment the user may hit the Alt-Tab key combination to switch to the next task.) The user may choose to simply end the tasking of the apparently-frozen program and to thereafter restart the program afresh from its basic start-up state.
Sometimes, this close-and-restart-afresh option is not an attractive one for the end-user. It may be that the end-user did not, or believes he did not, save to nonvolatile memory (e.g., to hard disk), a segment of work product that he/she last generated with the application just before the given application became frozen. Closing-and-restarting the frozen program afresh may mean that the unsaved work may be lost forever or that the user will have to repeat many hours of work to thereby painfully reconstruct the state of the application program just before it apparently became frozen. In some instances, the pre-freeze state of the application may represent non-replicatable work product such as data that had just been captured and/or transformed in real-time.
To remedy this predicament, various un-freezing techniques have been developed. These try to revive the frozen/crashed program at least to a suffici

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