full screen vanishing act

I have come across a strange problem trying to make an AIR app, authored in Flex, go fullscreen.

First of all, I hit the problem of trying to use the “stage” reference of WindowedApplication in my creationComplete handler method. As John C. Bland II points out, “when creationComplete is called the stage object is null”. He suggests applicationComplete as a better event to use, as per Raghu’s post on a similar topic, and Wietse Veenstra’s helpful explanation of the order of Flex startup events.

All well and good, but I found when I tried to go fullscreen in an applicationComplete handler, there is no error, but my app goes completely invisible. I can see the app in the taskbar (on my crappy work Windows machine) but no actual app window on the screen.

Really weird. I was able to hack it up rather horribly (using a Timer object, if you must know the ugly truth) but I want to be able to do it properly. Perhaps there is some information needed to go fullscreen that is not available on applicationComplete, but is available later. Same problem was there on the first updateComplete event.