Wasn't it Maurice who wrote:
>Maurice wrote:
>> I wish POVray would prevent the screensaver to kick in while it is 
>> rendering.
>> 
>I did not explain further because at the moment I wrote that post I ... 
>well I wasn't myself and I might have insulted some people in my rant.
>
>Anyway the reason for my suggestion is, that I have this screensaver 
>that I like very much. When I'm not rendering it is great fun to watch. 
>However, it is rather heavy on the CPU usage. So, when I start rendering 
>and the screensaver kicks in, my screensaver and POV start fighting over 
>CPU cycles. I get a blackscreen and no matter how much I use the mouse 
>or keyboard the computer won't respond to me until the render finishes. 
>This really bothers me. I have considered using the blankscreen saver 
>but I want to use the one I'm using now.
>Other applications can switch off the screensaver momentarily, so I 
>suggest that POV-ray be made to do the same.
>I don't want to give up my screensaver for the sake of rendering. And I 
>don't want to give up rendering for the sake of my screensaver.
>I don't have the illusion that tommorow there will be a patch of MegaPOV 
>and POV-Ray doing just that, but at least it's out in the open now.

Is it possible that you've got your render priority set so high that the
screen saver can't get enough CPU to respond to your mouse and keyboard
input? You can change the POV render priority via the Render menu. I
don't know how what priority Windows screensavers run at (and can't work
out how to check it - I can only display the priorities of running
programs but when a screensaver runs I can't see the display), but it
must be quite low if it doesn't get any CPU time at all when POV is
rendering.

Changing the priorities so that the screensaver gets some CPU cycles
will make the render take a little longer, but you might find that
preferable to the other options that are currently available. How much
longer it takes will depend on what priorities you end up using, and
that's going to depend on which version of Windows you're running. (I
can see from your message headers that you're running Windows, but not
which version.)

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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