Causality crashes on every startup

I'm not 100% sure why this is happening, and apparently only for one person ever. My best bet is that you have some security software that's somehow quarantining the file, preventing us from writing to it. What's strange is that it's in the regular system temp folder where you've supposed to do it. We're doing it 100.00% right.

We'll add some asserts to this condition so we'll hear about it if it happens to others.

I just reinstalled Causality on my workstation and same result as on my laptop:

- Right after installation Causality starts fine

- Stopping and restarting the software --> it crashes

- Removed Caulayout.pdf

- It works

Everything seems ok to me, thanks for your help.

OK. It's a mystery how that file became write protected on both of your system, or had its permissions changed after creation. We didn't rig it with helpful errors because we thought it would never happen.

Hello,

Thank-you for your prompt response.

1 - There is no accent in the usernames on my two computers.

2 - I deleted the Caulayout.pdf file ....... and suspense ...... it works 😀

On my laptop I started Causality, stopped and restarted several times and there seem to be no more problems.

Indeed the original Caulayout.pdf file was impossible to open with Acrobat Reader. But the new pdf file that is automatically created when opening Causality no longer seems to be a problem.

I will be able to confirm you during the day when I work on my workstation.

But already a big thank you.

The cause is most likely around disk access for a temporary file that needs to be written. Based on this hypothesis, we were able to replicate your crash exactly. The question is whether there's something wrong on your system, or a bug. Let's note that this happens on both of your systems, so a bug is more likely.

When we do simulated printing, we're forced to create a file at

C:/Users/<USER>/AppData/Local/Temp/caulayout.pdf

If this file can't be created, print layout fails, and the code isn't rigorous in this area, because it was thought to never happen. We can replicate your crash by setting this file to read-only.

So the first thing to do is locate this file in your temp folder, and delete it. Maybe some other program on your system intervened previously (like an anti-virus), and now it's sitting there, locked.

Secondly, what is the "<USER>" part of this path? This is your underlying Windows username. Does it have French characters in it? Maybe the framework has a bug that trips it up on French accents, or we have a string encoding bug (unlikely, since this has worked fine for Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic users).

It's definitely something around page measurement. The team will look at it tomorrow.

FYI I deactivated the free version of AVAST which is installed on my two computers but that does not solve the problem.

We'll discuss it here. This is the first case of crashing like this. We'll see if the others have some insights.

Since my two Windows are in French, some texts and menus are translated into French and others are not.

Maybe there are problems with the translations?

Thank you for your detailed answer but it still doesn't work.

On my laptop I have:

- Uninstalled Causality

- Choose "Microsoft print to PDF" as the default printer (Before it was my Brother laser printer connected to the network via NAS Synology which was the default)

- Restarted Windows

- Re-installed Causality

- During the first start I had access to the software and I could see that "Microsoft print to PDF" was well selected in Causality.

- Closed and reopened Causality... and it still crashes the same way.

Got it. Please try to select another default printer.

Currently, Causality does an internal page layout in order to find out how pages break in order to get page count, basically a simulated printing. We use a feature of the framework the app is written in called a DocumentPrinter, and while that simulated printing should be purely theoretical, we know that it sometimes wants to talk to the printer driver on Windows anyway. It's a strange design, and one we hope goes away the next time we update the version of this framework.

On Windows, this can sometimes cause the app to hang while Windows bizarrely takes several minutes to scan for capabilities of the attached printers. I've never seen it crash, but this is where you're crashing.

If you have a PDF software printer, please select that as default, because it doesn't need to talk to any hardware.

It's a mystery why they've designed what should be a pure data operation to actually query printers, and then hang or crash when there's any kind of problem. We don't have a good alternative to this right now, and it does work almost always. So the solution for now will be to come up with a way to mitigate it.

I just did it just now.

Send it to support@hollywoodcamerawork.com. This also includes a log (if you didn't disable it) that shows where it's crashing.

Hi Per,

Thank you for your reply.

During the very first installation on a computer, the software apparently starts normally, but I haven't gone very far in the functions.

After that, each time the software is started, the crash sequence is as follows:

1 - after startup, brief display of the startup splash screen

2 - unexpected closing of the software

3 - display of the crash splash screen

4 - I click on send the error report

5 - return to point 1

6 - and so on until I restart the computer

If I uninstall and reinstall Causality we go directly to point 1

What is strange is that I have the same problem on two different computers, one of which is very recent.

I deleted the "crashes" folder but the problem is still present.

I will send you the zipped "crashes" folder as you requested.

Gerard.

Hi Gerard,

That's strange indeed. We did have an issue way back when where the crash reporter itself could crash, causing an infinite loop. If we stay on the hypothesis that it's somehow a bad crash report, let's try to remove all your pending crash reports.

First, do you get to the app's actual splash screen, or is the crash reporter the furthest you've gotten. If you've only ever seen the crash reporter, then it's possible there's a graphics driver crash, and we'd like to receive the crash.

Open a Command Prompt, and then paste the following:

explorer "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Hollywood Camera Work\Causality

Then remove the folder called "crashes". Try to start the app again.

If it crashes again, please make a Zip file of the contents of the "crashes" folder, which will now have been regenerated and will contain a crash report.