Flare crashes while editing

[gkidder]

Flare 7.1 crashes on me four or five times a day with no explanation (just "Flare has stopped working"). I'm doing some rather complicated layouts for pdf output, with lots of floating text boxes and images in the margin and such. Don't know if it's a display issue--although they display fine. Anybody else have this problem?

[lacastle]

Do you have your GUI editor showing the "complicated" PDF layout all the time? Does Flare crash this often if you work in web layout?
Is there some particular action you are doing every time it crashes? i had a problem years ago (and many flare versions ago) with crashes whenever i pasted into a table i think.

Is your .NET current?

[gkidder]

My .NET is current. And there is no particular action I'm doing when it happens. I am doing a lot of copy/paste from FrameMaker, then reformatting in Flare. (Import simply won't handle the complicated layout with multiple conditions, etc., and I want to start clean rather than fix everything.)

I do have the GUI set to the Print view because of the fussy layout (every page has to fit precisely). Also doing a fair amount of editing directly with code in text editor. Maybe I could back off to Web layout for a little bit. I'll try.

[sperkins]

I'm having the same problem working on the same kinds of PDF output, but in Flare 7.2. I'm running in Windows 7 64-bit with tons and tons of memory, so I'm upset that it sometimes takes me several hours to unlock all the locked files and fix whatever broke.
Is this a known bug?
I also notice that the Import styles feature is so slow that I think it is crashing, when it actually just takes about three minutes for each execute command to complete.
How do I create my layouts and styles without crashing so often? I already reboot at least once a day to try and clear the cache.

[whunter]

FWIW, about the Import Styles being so slow that it appears to crash, I submitted this issue to MadCap support at one time and got the following response:

When the Import Styles dialog opens, there is a check box called "Hide Properties".
If this is unchecked, please check it. The reason it is so slow, is because the dialog tries to display every property for every style and if you have a lot of styles, it takes a long time.
I am reporting this as a bug to development that we should only show the style Name, Tag, Class, and Preview.

[paul55]

I've had this happen from time to time, and in my case it usually seems to be a lack of Windows GDI/User resources. In Task Manager I can see that some processes are using several thousand GDI/User handles, so if I shut those down then the crashing in Flare seems to go away.

(If you don't know what I'm referring to, I mean the Processes tab in Task Manager, and you may have to use the View -> Select Columns menu command to turn on the GDI Objects and USER Objects columns in the process list.)

When I get the crashes ("unhandled exceptions") in Flare, I clicked on the Details button and looked at the stack trace; in each case it was something related to GDI or drawing stuff on the screen. So that was what made me think low resources, and that does indeed seem to be the cause of it on my system.

HTH,

-Paul