I use Windows 7. When using Scrivener, I pinned the icon for Scrivener Beta 1.0 to my taskbar. Later I closed the program, and now whenever I click on the icon on my taskbar, the program opens far enough to tell me that the beta will expire in December. When I click OK, the announcement goes away, but the program doesn’t open. I waited a bit to see if it was just being slow or delayed, then checked the task manager. Not there.
Last night the same thing happened, except I tried other ways to open the program (i.e. from the start menu) thinking that the pinning was just broken. Then, when the program did open, it was frozen. I waited hours for it to unfreeze, thinking it was just overloaded and confused but it never did. However, during the time it took me to type this out, Scrivener did open.
The lag in opening the program concerns me because it really is taking a significant amount of time (I’m not that impatient, really!) and there’s no indication whatsoever that the program is opening instead of somehow broken, and if you try to open it too many times to freeze. If there were some kind of “waiting” icon as a step one, that might help, or if the program just opened faster.
For comparison: Word 2007 (which has been bugging out like crazy for me lately) does take a bit of time to open, but the immediate response to my opening the program (the “waiting” icon over my mouse and the “MS Word” splash screen) doesn’t lead to me breaking the program by trying to open it too many times thinking I did it wrong.
What hardware are you running? It could be of a concern.
Is the Scrivener instance open when you click on it when it is pinned? Hit Ctrl+alt+del and look for “Scrivener.exe” in the processes. If it is there but not showing up on your screen, then that could be a cause for concern.
Could you open the program from a simple desktop shortcut?
It does show up in processes, good call… and now that I think about it the beta notice probably counts as my “reassurance,” but still, the freezing if you try to open it multiple times is a problem.
It opens the same from the pinned icon and other locations, the problem is if you keep trying to open it because you’re dumb like me . Other programs just open two instances, ignore me, or open multiple documents. Scrivener freezes. That’s the “real” bug in my eyes.
I’m using a Dell XPS M1330 that’s about two years old, 32bit system type, with the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T850 @ 2.16GHz, 4GB ram (3.50 GB usable).
I’m starting to believe that it is a problem with Scrivener and how Windows 7 handles the taskbar now. The Taskbar in XP/Vista is significantly different from Windows 7 and while it may work flawlessly with XP/Vista taskbars, it may not with Win7.
With your specifications, I think we can eliminate slow-down due to hardware as a reason.
If it works from a desktop shortcut, I suggest you use that for the time being. I don’t know if Lee can reproduce this bug/issue, but it is good to point it out anyway.
ARGH I NEED TO READ.
So, opening multiple instances of Scrivener cause the program to freeze, regardless of what you click to open it?
Opening multiple instances of WoW doesn’t freeze it? Hmm…
Yes. The rest was just to “fully explain” how I got to where I was in figuring out the issue. Because I’m not sure if it’s a “performance issue” or a “multiple instances” issue.
Ok, I just tried to open multiple instances but it refused to open up more than one Scrivener window. Then again, I’m on WinXP with no means to try it on Win7.
When I “open multiple instances” I don’t actually get more than one Scrivener window. I just got one Scrivener window that happened to never un-freeze.
ETA: Just installed 1.1 (I hope. If I did it right. The taskbar icon still says 1.0!), let me see if I can replicate the issue on this version.
Well, now I get two warning messages. The first informs me that scrivener is from an unknown publisher, though I didn’t get this warning before. Then I get the beta notice. It’s still taking a long time to open.
Will pin it to the taskbar as soon as it does, then try to open it a bunch of times, whee.
ETA: I still get the “are you sure you want to run this” message, but I don’t get the beta message when I run the program after I’ve already run the program.
I just updated to the new version also and the opening time has increased, though I don’t seem to be having the same degree of problem eldestmuse is: it does, after about 45 seconds, open for me. If I click the icon more than once, it does freeze however (either from pinned or from the program files folder; haven’t really tried it from the desktop shortcut yet). To be more specific, the beta message pops up right away, but after clicking okay it takes a long time for the program to open.
Additionally, it’s taking just as long to switch between projects. I opened Scrivener and it opened to the NaNo template. When I tried to open a project from my USB drive, the Open dialogue took about as long to come up as the program took to open, and was a bit laggy. After selecting the project and telling it to open, it took a shorter long time to open it (20-25 seconds).
This is on Win7, 3GB of RAM, and iTunes running in the background.
. Other programs just open two instances, ignore me, or open multiple documents. Scrivener freezes. That’s the “real” bug in my eyes.