Beta 029 Crashed system

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

MM -

I had one program open - Scrivener. I had been working all day, so it had been running all day. I started a new chapter. No problem. Filled in the synopsis. No problem. Typed in a couple hundred words. Crash. My monitor went black and windows rebooted. This is a very stable XP system (3 years old? maybe more?) and it has never crashed like that before. Just gone. I attributed this to Scrivener.

When it rebooted I fixed the Incompatible version error by putting 16 into the empty version file.

But, despite having the save every two minutes option set, I lost the contents of the chapter. When I checked the rtf file, it had 3K. When I opened it in TextPad, it contained nothing but black marks (a thick version of |).

Is there a memory leak? Is the program writing into the reserved space?

Thanks,
Doug

2

More info. I had recently performed a project wide replacement of a couple of names, and I also changed them in the keyword section as well as in the meta-data label. And I changed them in the Synopsis titles. The changes in the text all took. None of the meta-data changes did, except that in the body of the synopsis all was good. Just not in the titles.

Thanks

Doug

3

Hi Doug,

Did you get any error messages before or after the crash? If you could check your Windows logs for this and provide the copy here, I’d really appreciate it, as Scrivener crashing the whole system is a serious issue that we haven’t any info on. You should be able to get the Windows-generated report by following these steps:

  1. Open the Control Panel and choose Administrative Tools
  2. Open Computer Management
  3. In the tree view, select System Tools\Event Viewer\Application
  4. In the window on the right, you should see a list of reports Information, Error, and Warning. Sort these by type or date, and then look for any errors that occurred at the time of your freeze–the source column should say something like “Application Error” or “Application Hang”.
  5. Double-click to open the error report and make sure that “Scrivener.exe” is referenced in the description, then click the copy button to put the info on your clipboard and you can paste that here

As for the project itself, it sounds as though it may have gotten partially corrupted in the crash. If you want to send a copy of the project to support AT literatureandlatte DOT com, I can take a look, although chances are I won’t be able to restore anything, particularly if the .rtf file was corrupted. To send the file, right-click on the project’s entire .scriv folder and choose “Send to / Compressed (zipped) file” and then attach that to your email if it’s 20MB or under. Even if a few files were disrupted in the crash, you can safely continue working in the project and overwrite the files–for instance, you can start redoing the keywords and titles; all of that is stored in the .scrivx file, so it was probably upset in the crash, but it’s not going to continue to menace the file and your new changes will stick.

I hope the crash report will provide enough information for Lee to discover what caused the problem, and if you remember any other details leading up to this, please do let me know. I’m extremely sorry that you’ve lost writing, and I’d like to root this issue out as quickly as possible, as I’m sure you would too. Lee has been doing a lot of work to stabilize the program for the next beta release, but it would be good if we coud confirm this particular problem has been dealt with.

4

MM

I may have jumped the gun, and perhaps Scrivener had nothing to do with the crash. Lets wait and see if it happens again. I’ll be running Scrivener perhaps 10-12 hours a day for the next two or three weeks as I try to make deadline, so that will surely put it to the test!

In reviewing the event log, and comparing the time stamps of the events against the time of the corrupted .rtf file, I realize several things:

  1. Although I was running 1 program, windows was running a bunch in the background including gupdate.exe and Norton’s Live Update.
  2. There was no event created for over ten minutes prior to the crash. Post crash there were of course a bunch of system events because the system was restarting.

BUT in looking through the Application Event Log, I came across Errors since installing 029 as follows:
Faulting application scrivener.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module qtcore4.dll, version 4.7.2.0, fault address 0x000f56b9.

This one had multiple occurrences with the same address. The following were one off events in the Application log.

Faulting application scrivener.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x00000004.
Faulting application scrivener.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module scrivener.exe, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x0006663b.

Thanks, Doug

5

Thanks, Doug. I certainly hope you don’t see another system crash, but let me know if you do and, again, if there’s any crash report from Scrivener for that event (or if you find a system report that indicates Scrivener in the causes). And although I’m sure you have been, especially as you’re running up against a deadline, make sure to make regular project backups over the next few weeks!