the popup appears to prepare for the microbreak and then it counts down, the red line starts blinking and then a crashing noise and everything is disappearing.

It seems to happen every single time.

The rest break (so far) works well.

Is Workrave stable in Vista?

(In reply to comment #0)
> the popup appears to prepare for the microbreak and then it counts down, the
> red line starts blinking and then a crashing noise and everything is
> disappearing.

Strange. I've never before heard of a software crash producing a "crashing noise".

From your description, the popup appears, but workrave decides that you are still busy. Hence it starts blinking. When, after a time, you are still busy, workrave either forces you to take a break, or it removes the popup and produces a buzzing sound.

There are two things I'd like you to try:

1.
When the popup appears, stop working. Workrave should detect that you are inactive, and show a break window. There should be no blinking. I know of one report where activity detection is broken (bug 776), but if that is the case it should be equally broken for both micropauses and restbreaks.

2.
Open the preferences window. In the micro-break tab, make sure that the checkbox before "maximum number of prompts" is checked, and that the value behind it is 1. Now, there should be no more buzzing sounds for micro-breaks. You will be forced to take a break every time.

Please let us know if any of this helps.