MadCap Software Forums

I am evaluating Flare 3.1.0, and have been vexed by almost constant crashes while generating output files in a project. I discovered after a few days that this happens if Flare is blocked by the Windows Vista firewall, even if the current project does not require access to network resources. In this case, Flare causes an error in the Windows kernel, is stopped by Vista before it can issue any error messages, and just disappears . This seems to mean I must let Flare access the network even if it does not need it, which in itself is a potential security risk (my simple rule-of-thumb is denying access to the network to anything that does not really need it).

I had almost given up on Flare before discovering the cause of crashes (and also finding a few simple bugs in the editor that should have been caught by testers). Was anyone aware of the firewall quirk, does it affect also registered versions, and should I know about any other quirks in order not to waste more time?

Under XP you get an error message if Flare is blocked, but it doesn't die. I agree with you, though, that Flare really shouldn't need to phone home as often as it wants to.

I'd suggest filing a bug report. Madcap probably knows about it already, but from what they tell us the more people complain about something the higher priority it is to get fixed. You can report bugs here:

https://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

Probably something to do with it phoning home for license checking.

Earlier versions of Flare didn't handle odd networking configurations too well. Its gotten better over the last few builds, but simple things like disconnecting from a VPN while it is running can still crash it.