Using Slidelets can cause lengthy delays in Advanced Actions

Hi everyone,

For anyone that might like using slidelets in Captivate projects, I thought I would just post this bit of cautionary information so that anyone else experiencing the same issue I have today won't have to waste time on it.

I had a project that used a menu slide to branch users to other slides or sections in the same project before returning them to the menu.  I rigged up captions on the menu slide to name each section with two coloured rectangles under each caption. One rectangle (company orange) indicated an uncompleted section, while another hidden caption in company green would be revealed by Advanced Actions after the section had been completed by the user. The change in background colour under the transparent caption naming the section looked quite effective and instantly indicated to the users which sections they had completed or failed to complete.

Initially I placed slidelets over the section captions so that I could play introductory audio about the section on mouseover, and use the slidelet's click action to branch to the section.  But later I decided against the audio, deleted it from the slidelets, and just went with the click action.

I created a Conditional Advanced Action for the Menu slide and triggered it ON SLIDE ENTER.  This CAA would test which sections had so far been completed and show or hide the relevant coloured rectangles accordingly.

However...later I started having weird latency issues where users returning to the menu slide would have to wait for several seconds before my Advanced Action would finish processing and allow the slide to play.  You could see the playbar go into Pause mode until something released the blockage and it continued play.

What was really annoying was that sometimes it would work perfectly, yet other times it would lag terribly.  It did this in HTM/SWF running off my hard drive, PDF, and SCORM modules on the LMS. 

After some hours debugging, and even rebuilding the CAA, I found that the issue was caused by the slidelets in the menu slide.  For some reason, they were intermttently preventing the slide from loading quickly.  Once I removed the slidelets and replaced them with simple click boxes, the issue disappeared.  Don't ask me WHY they caused this issue.  All I know is that removing them fixed it.

If you're reading this, maybe my experience will save you some hours of frustration.