I was busy with my edits and in the middle of entering edits, Scrivener stopped working.
Before I did anything, I saved the file to my desktop and then tried to save it again in Scrivener
I received an error message that the binder had an error. So I renamed the file so I could continue working on my edits. It gave me fits about overwriting the old file. I renamed the file and saved it as a new file. Then I closed the program. It would not reopen. I tried the shortcut that I have been using and the actual executable file. It spun and nothing happened.
I couldn’t get the program to open up.
So I went to your home page and did the update installer. Still the executable file will cause my cursor to spin, but then nothing happens. How can I access my book to compile it and put it in Word? I am getting this ready for an agent and am scared that my book is stuck in Scrivener format.
You mentioned an error about the binder, and renaming a file… which file was that? Did you close Scrivener first? Were there any other similar files? Finally, do you keep your project in a folder for some kind of cloud sync service, like Dropbox, Google Drive, or MS’s Skydrive? That information will likely be very useful to the support team.
cgarwriter, did you send the email to support as Robert suggested? I took a look for your email address there but didn’t see anything, but as you didn’t follow up here either I’m hoping that means the issue has been resolved.
If I follow your description, it sounds like Scrivener’s trying to automatically open your project on program launch and is failing to do so. This could be just from something relatively benign like having a lengthy Scrivenings session loaded, and it’s stalling out trying to pull all that together during the startup procedure.
Try going into the project’s .scriv folder and in the Settings folder, drag out the ui.ini file (you can just move it to another location outside the .scriv folder for the moment, don’t delete it). Then try starting Scrivener again and see if it will open the project. The ui file controls the project’s interface settings, including what files are loaded in the editor, what the group view mode is, whether label colours are used places, etc. so all of that will look different, but if the project loads now, we can address that next.
I’m not entirely clear what errors you received in the process of saving or renaming the files. Save As won’t let you overwrite an open project or save a project within any project’s .scriv folder, so most likely that’s all the second one was about, and you clearly got around it. You should then have two copies of the project, the original and the new version created via Save As.
If removing the ui.ini file does not work, replace it in the project’s Settings folder and then rename the .scriv folder, e.g. from My Novel.scriv to My Novel-Stalling.scriv. Then try launching Scrivener again from its executable or shortcut (not via the .scrivx of the renamed project). That should prevent Scrivener trying to load the project on launch, and you may be able then to load either the original or the save-as version of the project once Scrivener is already running.
