Nothing changed at all as far as I can tell on my Scrivener, but it now won’t open. 1.30 am this morning it opened. Now it won’t. I’ve logged the computer on twice today, once to open an Excel document and the second time, I got this error from a fresh boot.
Not sure exactly what I can give you, so I’ll give you all I can and hope it’s useful. I’m well aware that the 1.3 distro could solve this.
Standard Windows XP warning: Scrivener.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
On clicking to see what the error report would contain:
On clicking to see the technical data that would be sent with the report, this is the contents of the file that would be sent. Sorry it’s a bit long. Let me know if it’s unnecessary and I’ll cut it out.
EDIT: I cut it out on discovering where the problem lie. Still no solution; read below for other people having the same problem.
The 3rd beta doesn’t work either, so I guess the problem’s with my system, somehow. It was working, then it wasn’t, with no changes made. I was so looking forward to using this to do my NaNoWriMo, too.
Thanks anyway.
EDIT: Scratch that. Managed to make it work by deleting (!) all of my work thus far (but I have a backup) and reintroducing the files one at a time.
The file causing the problem is the project.scriv file. Is this just a glitch and I should be thankful my project (and Scrivener) is still intact? Or should I be worried?
I’ve got this error too with the 3rd beta. I’ve never gotten this error before updating to the third beta. It only happens occassionally, when I go into the fullscreen function, though.
“Scrivener.exe has encountered a problem and has to close” pops up whenever I try to open Scrivener or whenever I try to open my project file.
I can get it to open via clicking on the tutorial or another dummy project, however, every time I go back to my own project, I get the error. Very rarely it will still open, but then it will freeze up and eventually spit out the error again.
I think what’s going on is my project has become corrupt somehow. I didn’t back up the project itself although the files folder is safe. Is there any way to “uncorrupt” the project file?!
(I note that this started happening only after I had 2 projects open at one time, when I was looking at the tutorial file, on the second beta.)
Well, I opened my project file in wordpad and cut and paste everything between and and stuck it in a “dummy” project file opened in word pad (after removing everything between and in that file).
I then took my modified dummy project file and replaced the old project file with the dummy, and voila, the file is restored! I am not sure what caused to glitch but it apparently was not in the code between and .
I’m still getting this error, though I think I might have narrowed down one or two causes.
-When I opened some of the text files from the first attempt to run Scrivener, I was missing a lot of the most recent edits. Some text files just had one strange character in them. My wonderful wife was able to open them on her Mac and retrieve the text, somehow. She didn’t do anything special to them, so I’m confused.
-When I started a new project but put the old files in the docs folder of Scrivener, thinking it might automatically spot them and add them, it didn’t, but opening new documents in Scrivener caused them to be autopopulated with the text from those old files. Strange.
-Eventually it started crashing every time I started a new document, so I deleted the rest. I’ve lost nothing, but it’s dodgy. There was one with a few links that it really seemed to choke on.
-I’m now in a position where I can type, no worries, but I can’t make any more documents. In other words, I might as well be on MS Word, which is a shame. If I do try, I immediately get that ‘Scrivener must close’ note, and then it crashes and refuses to close. I have to right click and end program that way.
Glad it’s not just me that’s suffering from this, but it’s a shame it happens at all. I know the team are working hard to fix just this sort of thing though!
I’ve edited my first post, now I’ve narrowed down the problem, to make it easier.
I had the same problem after pasting in some text from a website. There didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it, but it did have some bullets. I was able to get back into the program by going directly to a different project. The problem was that the file that caused the crash was automatically loaded because it was the last one open.
I found that the problem was in the last numbered RTF in the Doc sub-directory of the file that was causing the crash. I just deleted it and didn’t lose all the formatting, links, etc., just the stuff I had pasted in.
Basic, standard behaviour of Scrivener is that it will open up the last project you were working on when you closed it. If this project becomes corrupted in any way, Scrivener will try to open it anyway, and when it can’t, it will crash.
To isolate the problem, first go to your Scrivener folder in the “Program Files” and open up the tutorial project inside. This should, hopefully, open up Scrivener to prevent it from opening up the corrupted project.
Once you verify that Scrivener is working properly, try to open your project that gives you the “encountered an error and crashed”. If it happens again, that means your project is likely to be corrupted in one way or another.
If you use DropBox and work with Scrivener projects within the Dropbox folder while it is syncing data, that may lead to corruption issues. As for other causes, they haven’t yet to be determined or explored. If this happens consistently to you, try to note down or recall what you were doing prior that led to program crashes. Did your computer shut down improperly? Did the program fail to shut down properly? Are you using improper file names?
If you think it will help, you may submit your corrupted project to Lee so he can trouble shoot a little bit more.
Okay, I’m not entirely sure why this would happen based on what people have posted. However, whilst this is not a fix as such, in the Options -> General tab there is a setting which you can deselect titled: “Open recent projcts on program launch”. If this is unchecked, Scrivener will not try to load the previous project. Based on what you are reporting you might have to access this dialog by opening the tutorial project first?
Keep me posted as this is a little concerning.
Lee
p.s. please also include which version of windows you are running.
I upgraded Scrivener for Windows today from Beta1.0 to 1.3 (missed the other update). Had no problems whatsoever with 1.0, however, 1.3 keeps crashing with scrivener.exe has encountered an error.
I am using Windows Vista Ultimate, Dropbox to sync all of the Scrivener files and also open up Scrivener on Windows 7 Starter on my netbook (but haven’t touched that this morning yet).
Immediately after the upgrade to 1.3, Scrivener opened ok, with all of my recent files in place. I then changed the font to Time Roman, size 12 in Options/Editor and then went to Documents/Snapshot/Take a Snapshot of All Text Documents. Scrivener then crashed with the above error message and I couldn’t open up my project at all. I then un-installed v1.3 and reinstalled from fresh but same problem, couldn’t open up the project file.
I followed instructions in this post to open up the tutorial, that was fine. Went back to my project file and it opened ok, but it was a very old version missing all of the text that I’d previously pasted into it (which then synced back to my dropbox folder, so good job I have another backup). The next time I opened it however, same problem - Scrivener.exe has encountered an error and I can’t open it at all now.
Appreciate the project file is now corrupt but wonder what caused it to be corrupt as I never had this problem in beta v 1.0? Let me know if you want me to send you the project file and how. Thanks
Update: I uninstalled beta v1.3 and rolled back to beta v1.0 and was still getting the same error above. Scrivener always seemed to crash when I clicked between files and then discovered it was a particular text file. So I deleted this file from files/docs (couldn’t do it from within the app due to program crash) and then Scrivener worked ok after that. I upgraded again to v1.3 and all is still running well with no crashes. My problem seemed to be a text file corruption after the upgrade. All is working fine now.
Hmmm, the file that has the icon? For me it’s just called “Project (scrivener project file)” and has the Scrivener icon and is within the project.scriv folder…I accessed the code by right clicking and opening in word pad…
I’m using Windows XP, System Pack 3. The whole thing is working ok so far, touch wood; I’ve done away with the file I think was causing the trouble, one with a lot of hyperlinks in it. It was trying to load that page, I think, that was causing the problem, just as you suggested, Lee.
