The current theory is that something has been changed in Internet Explorer (inside of which the TD runs) such that when IE is rendering in a window, any keystrokes or mouse clicks that happen during the rendering may be lost. This probably isn't a big deal for most applications that use IE in this way, because windows are typically rendered and then remain static for a long time. However, the Tournament Director is constantly rendering (several times a second) in the main window, to update the clock, time of day, and whatever else may change at any time. It is unfortunate that the TD is uncommon in this respect because it means it's less likely to receive attention from Microsoft. But I'm hopeful.
If you want to see how rendering affects typing/clicking, do this:
- Create a new tournament
- Add and buy-in to the tournament 30 or 40 players
- Display the Player Rankings screen (press F3)
- Open the Settings window and go to the Game tab
- Start typing in the Notes field
If you have the same results as me, you'll see that keystrokes are highly affected when the Player Rankings screen is scrolling the list of players up or down. When the list is stationary (when the list reaches the top or bottom, or by right-clicking and selecting "Disable Auto scroll"), few if any keystrokes are lost.
Can the effect be mitigated? Somewhat, I've found. Reducing how much rendering has to be done can reduce the amount of lost keystrokes or mouse clicks. Disabling Auto scroll on the built-in screens (Player Rankings, Seating Chart, etc). Removing time-of-day and any other fields that would be updated often (except for the game clock, of course). Reducing the size of the game clock so rendering takes less time. None of these things will fix the issue, but they may make the application more usable.
I'm still investigating whether or not there's anything within the software I can do to further mitigate the issue, but so far haven't found anything significant.