I recently did a Windows 11 repair reinstall (keeping all apps/documents) to fix some ongoing issues. From then on, whenever I tried to do project find/replace of words/phrases, it would crash Scrivener. Not sure if the Windows 11 repair reinstall did something to cause it.
Hi.
It could possibly be your antivirus (whichever you are using).
You can try :
Disconnect from the internet.
Temporarily turn it off.
Test a find/replace in your Scrivener project that otherwise crashes.
If you don’t get a crash, turn your antivirus back on (don’t forget it turned off !!), and then whitelist Scrivener, in your antivirus’ settings, for ransomware or whatever your antivirus names it.
This is AVG :
. . . . . . .
If that doesn’t do, then perhaps it is a matter of setting back the permissions right.
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Are your projects saved in OneDrive or another cloud service? It’s possible your settings changed with the reinstall. If some of Scrivener’s internal files are offloaded, I could see that crashing Scrivener when it’s trying to search files that aren’t actually available. If you’re using OneDrive, double-check your files on demand settings. In Dropbox, it’s makes files available offline. The entire .scriv project folder should be available locally.
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@JenT Couldn’t it also be from Windows now optimizing the disk space? (Compressing folders.)
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Yes, I have all my Scrivener projects in my Dropbox folder, so I can sync them to the iOS version on my iPad. After my Windows repair/reinstall, all my apps and documents and settings are still intact, so nothing’s changed there.
Dropbox has notoriously changed file settings without people’s knowledge in recent history, generally after running updates. Have you verified that your project folder shows a green circle with a checkmark? There’s a description of the Dropbox sync symbols and where to look for them here: Dropbox sync icons in the Windows desktop app - Dropbox Help - Dropbox Help
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Yes, there’s green circle with checkmark, and it also syncs with my iPad Scrivener without issues.
OK, thanks for verifying! How big is the document you’re trying to do find/replace in? Are there any media elements like images?
Also, have you tried doing a fresh install of Scrivener? That won’t affect your project files and is a fairly easy troubleshooting step to try in case your OS repair damanged/lost some of Scrivener’s internal files.
The project folder is 32.5 MB. There are about 25 images used as “casting photos” for character profile pages.
I just reinstalled Scrivener (using the latest download from the website), and the crash still happens when I do project find/replace of words.
I’m wondering if in the Windows repair process some symlinks were broken.
Try this:
Download the project from Dropbox (using your web browswer or the Dropbox app).
Rename the downloaded project to something meaningful, and put it somewhere you do not normally store Scrivener projects.
Open Scrivener, load the newly renamed project and see if the crash persists.
I just tried it, and it still crashed Scrivener. But then I realized I forgot to rename the project, so I renamed both the project folder and the .scrivx file. That actually fixed the problem.
So what does that mean? And do I just move the renamed version back into the dropbox folder and continue to use it? What would happen if I delete the old version from dropbox and then changed the renamed version back to the the original name?
If the downloaded and renamed copy works, that points towards either a broken symlink or other file corruption.
Were it me, I’d rename and archive the original “[date]_[project]_broken.zip” I’d restart the computer, then open Scrivener and create a new project named similar to the original, then use the IMPORT function on the downloaded & renamed project that you said worked. I’d then archive the downloaded&renamed rescue file too. I’d work on the newly created one. But I’m a little paranoid about loosing work. As long as the downloaded and renamed file gets uploaded back to Dropbox with a different filename you are probably okay.
You could rename the project back to the original name, but I think it better that you don’t. It is my less-than-perfect understanding that Symlinks – when they work correctly – point indexed filenames to specific parts of the drive so that the linked file can appear to be in many places at once with a single root. So having a symlink indexed to the wrong address nets garbage and that can crash the working application. Just because you renamed the original host file, and then recovered a good copy doesn’t mean that if you rename the file back to the previously indexed filename that something might break.
Personally I loathe symlinking files for this very reason. Usually they work out okay, but not always and they can be a headache to diagnose.