MadCap Software Forums

We have Flare on a Windows 7 box and it keeps failing. One day it works and the next it does not.

We see no reason for this and the fix is to re-install Flare.

Why should this be? Could it be a Windows 7 problem? A Flare 7 problem? A hardware problem?

Any ideas or suggestions welcome.

Not sure why yours would be falling over, but if it helps, I am running Flare 7 fine on Windows 7, and also had no trouble with Flare v6 on Windows 7 for about a year.
Is your .NET up to date?

I recommend trying to repair .NET. But when you write Flare is failing, what exactly is the failure?

Seems odd that it works one day and not the next, what is making a difference? I would guess either rebooting or a program (not used every day) that is in conflict.

I agree with my learned colleagues you should reinstall the .NET frameworks before trying anything else, it is likely to make your system more stable if there is something wrong. Make sure you use the latest releases, otherwise the first time Windows update phones home you will be prompted to go down the update process anyway.

I'm running multiple versions of Flare on a Windows 7 box (64 bit) and have found it stable, but I'm not pushing the envelope with it.

Well as it turns out the user profile is being corrupted. We are not sure why? Would DotNet be the culprit there?

No, that is usual Windows behavior.

Is it? Not in my experience. More importantly, it renders Flare completely unusable.

I hear of corrupted Windows user profiles frequently and they often are a cause for all kinds of issues. As far as I can tell that is a deficiency of Windows.

Dot Net is built in to windows 7, so I doubt that is the problem, Are your profiles roaming profiles, or local to the machine? try a local profile to see what happens.

They are local to the machine. We are thinking it is a memory problem. That with Outlook and Flare open at the same time bad things are happening in low memory situations.

we've added 4GB to the computer. If the problems go away, I'll report back with that information.

How much memory was in there before? Also, is this W7 64 bit? If it is the 32 bit version then throwing more than 3GB RAM into the box will not do anything, because Windows cannot address more.

I only just learned something about Windows in a mailing list which might also be relevant for you:
All sorts of software use the Temp folder inside your user profile without deleting the stuff they put in there afterwards. Amongst other stuff I found a Flare setup pack in there with a size of 378 MB ... some people in that mailing list had 20 GB in that folder and were wondering why their PC or their software kept crashing. Everything went back to normal after deleting the content of the Temp folder in %LOCALAPPDATA% in the Explorer.

This should also be possible by using the Disk Cleanup tool from the drive properties dialog, but that tool does not take out everything that gunks up a system. A lot of the crap files are now off limits in W7, so it needs a better file explorer such as xplorer2. I do this once a month after applying updates on Patch Tuesday:
- delete any folder in C:\Windows that starts with a $ (you need to enable seeing hidden files and system files). Those folders mainly contain backups created by patch installers. NOTE: After deleting these folders you will not be able to (easily) uninstall any patches. In my 8+ years of taking care of over 50 systems I only once got into hot waters, and that was on my own box at home.
- delete any file in C:\Windows that has an extension of .log or .tmp
- delete anything in C:\Windows\Temp, ignore anything that cannot be deleted
- delete anything in C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Temp
- delete anything in C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
- delete anything in C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Downloads (of course, keep whatever you still want to keep, but better move it to secondary storage)

On W7/Vista, the user specific folders are C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp, C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\, and C:\Users\<user>\Downloads . When using xplorer2 or any file explorer less stupid than the one that comes with Windows the shortcuts will also work.

Lastly, I run the Disk Cleanup tool that now takes out the remaining trash such as queued error reports. I then do a disk defrag using MyDefrag. After that the system is in a shape as good as it gets.

As far as apps littering the temp folders, that should only be excused if the app crashed (the crash itself is not excused), otherwise this is a bug due to lazy developers.