I’m experiencing a strange bug with Scrivener beta 13 and I’ve downgraded back to beta 12 to continue to work but I’m worried I’ll be locked out when the beta expires in a week.
When I go to open the app the splash screen loads normally, and all of the expected notices show in the little status pane but then nothing happens, the app doesn’t load at all. There are no Scrivener processes running in the task manager either. I don’t know if there’s a place to get logs that might give more details so the best I have is nothing showing up hahah.
I was wondering if this was some sort of strange state caused by installing beta 13 before deleting beta 12 (oops) so I did a full reset of this computer and installed beta 13 on a completely fresh Windows install. The first time I tried to open my project it was successful, but when I closed Scrivener to fix some default styling Scrivener refused to open again.
I’m on a Microsoft Surface Laptop, and my project and backups are stored in Dropbox in case any of that information is helpful.
Could it be that during fixing some default styling while Scrivener is closed you have created a file which crashes, Scrivener? Starting Scrivener with the Ctrl key pressed should load Scrivener, without auto-loading your last loaded project. Give it a try.
Happens to me a lot (few times in the last week). Always while working on the same project. Using Ctrl during startup helps and after that Scrivener opens the problematic project without any trouble.
Opening with Ctrl does seem to work and I was able to start fresh projects. At first I wasn’t able to open the my main project with the dialogue that opened when Scrivener started up(it would silently crash again) but when I made a blank project and went to the File >> Open and selected my main project it opened just fine and subsequent attempts to open Scrivener now open the project properly. So we’re good!
Please, if this happens again upload the project or send it to tiho at literatureandlatte.com in a state which prevents Scrivener from starting. This will help us pinpoint the startup problem caused by the project and fix it.
If it starts plaguing you again, I suggest importing it into a new blank project. I’m not sure exactly what happens during import, but the process does something that helps correct buggy documents and projects.
In my comment there are 3 steps that might help you get your projects loading properly again.
I am posting these steps one more time here:
We found a problem caused by some of our recent startup project loading optimizations.
If you happen to experience the same problem please follow these steps:
Navigate to your Files\Data project sub-folder and delete the “docs.checksum” file inside.
Load your project in Scrivener as usual. It might take longer than usual but it should load.
Run File > Save And Rebuild Indexes. This should create valid “docs.checksum” file
To avoid this problem from happening again, please switch to Corkboard or Outliner mode before closing Scrivener. Closing Scrivener in Scrivenings mode, sometimes crashes Scrivener upon shutdown, causing a crash upon next start up too. This has been fixed and the fix will be available in the next update Beta 15. We will try to release the update sooner than later.