Screen saver doesn't start

[tetsuo13]

Scenario: I installed the screen saver weeks ago. It has been running as expected until several days ago. Windows is configured to start the screen saver after 10 minutes of inactivity. At the 10 minute mark, the entire screen quickly flickers and the screen saver never starts. This behavior repeats every 10 minutes of inactivity.

This behavior can be attributed to the bug described in dotnet/runtime#3778 in which the temporary directory where the screen saver library is extracted to is automatically deleted by the periodic Windows cleanup routines. Once Windows clears the temporary directory, the screen saver will never run again.

Event Viewer will have an entry similar to this:

Source: .NET Runtime
Event ID: 1023
Description: A .NET Core application failed.
Application: PIWIGO~1.SCR
Path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\PIWIGO~1.SCR
Message: The application to execute does not exist: 'C:\Users\Andrei\AppData\Local\Temp\.net\PIWIGO~1.SCR\o1o5oh4v.eic\PiwigoScreenSaver.dll'.

According to dotnet/core-setup#9013 this is slated to be fixed in .NET Core 3.1.4 at which point all that should be required is to update the SDK, build, and release.

As a workaround until then, deleting the C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Temp\.net\PIWIGO~1.SCR directory should be safe enough.

[tetsuo13]

Published 1.2.1 built with netcore 3.1.4.