Solving the Snagit blackout and non-ActiveWords?

Robin Capper

04 Jul 2010 — 2 min read

Something changed on my machine recently and impacted two of my favourite utilities.

Screen capture blues from the black, and non-ActiveWords

I went to take a screenshot and the capture looked like a photo taken in a coal mine with the lights out. You could see all the Snagit capture UI working perfectly (something like the faked image right) but the screen and resulting capture were solid black.

The Clues:

A quick trip to Techsmith support was in order but my ActiveWord “snagn”, which should launch the Snagit website, didn’t work. If the browser wasn’t running it launched and opened the site as expected but entering the ActiveWord in an existing browser had no effect. Then I found other ActiveWords didn’t work in the browser either. Strange?

I found this post regarding black/white/incomplete captures at Techsmith and it mentioned some security software blocking screen captures, including ZoneAlarm (which I use).

It recommended adding Snagit to the safe list which is found under Program Control>Programs in ZoneAlarm. However when I checked both Snagit and Snagit Editor were already listed and trusted to interact with other applications.

A trip to the ZoneAlarm forum revealed another clue from “ab-onguard”;

I am able to use SnagIt 9.1.3 by changing my Zonealarm Extreme Security suite 9.1.008's Forcefield's browser security settings/Advanced/Uncheck "block programs that secretly record your keystrokes". Without doing the above, SnagIt would not capture any "profile" settings. I have not had any SnagIt issues since !

The fixes;

Configure ZoneAlarm and fix ActiveWords:

I configured ZoneAlarm as suggested by disabling the “Anti-keylogger” section in the Browser Security (below). That restored ActiveWords functionality, which I guess does look like a key logger to AV software, but didn’t help Snagit even after a reboot.