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 Post subject: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2021 12:24 pm 
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Has anyone experienced crashes and lock-up when executing drag and drop onto a dock or in a folder on a dock in the last couple of weeks or so?

When the lock-up happens, the CPU runs extremely high. The path COM Surrogate/SysWow64 dllhost.exe can be accessed in the Task Manager. It's easy to spot because the process shows red and running so high.

It took me a while, but I was able to find the culprit. It turned out to be K-lite Codec Pack. It's 100% reproducible. I left it uninstalled for a least a day each time (at least 3 times) and Xtreme ran flawlessly. As soon as I reinstall K-lite Codec Pack and execute a drag and drop a couple of times, the dreaded dock crash and lock-up happens again.

After using K-lite Codec Pack for many years, this is the first time that it caused a crash of this nature with Winstep Xtreme.


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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Tue Apr 20, 2021 12:08 pm 
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Well, unfortunately, the problem came back after a few days even with K-lite Codec Pack uninstalled. I eventually reinstalled it. This is driving me nuts!

I seem to remember Jorge telling a few people to install a program that monitors the PC to figure out what's making Winstep crash. The CPU only runs high when I perform a drag and drop and then Winstep locks up. :?

Jorge if you're still out there (or anyone else that knows), what is the program? I guess Jorge would have to get involved at some point if the program finds what's triggering the problem.


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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Tue Apr 20, 2021 2:45 pm 
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Windy wrote:
Well, unfortunately, the problem came back after a few days even with K-lite Codec Pack uninstalled. I eventually reinstalled it. This is driving me nuts!

I seem to remember Jorge telling a few people to install a program that monitors the PC to figure out what's making Winstep crash. The CPU only runs high when I perform a drag and drop and then Winstep locks up. :?

Jorge if you're still out there (or anyone else that knows), what is the program? I guess Jorge would have to get involved at some point if the program finds what's triggering the problem.

Sorry Windy, I'm afraid I can't really help on this and we'll likely have to await Jorge's return, which I suspect can't be too far away now. I do seem to recall that on a previous such occasion Jorge sent the affected user/s a little util to track what was actually happening. Maybe a search here might bring it up?

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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 10:41 am 
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Joined: Wed Apr 14, 2021 2:10 pm
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Not a very pleasant problem. I wonder what exactly caused the software incompatibility? It would be interesting to know the solution to the problem.


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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Thu Sep 09, 2021 6:56 pm 
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I finally got to the bottom of what was causing the problem.

It's a Windows thumbnail cache issue. I could not fix the problem but figured out a workaround to prevent it from happening.

An update from Windows or Intel apparently created the problem.


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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Fri Sep 10, 2021 8:25 pm 
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Windy wrote:
I finally got to the bottom of what was causing the problem.

It's a Windows thumbnail cache issue. I could not fix the problem but figured out a workaround to prevent it from happening.

An update from Windows or Intel apparently created the problem.

Ha, that figures of course! Care to share your workaround for others who might encounter this problem, Windy?

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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Sun Sep 12, 2021 4:40 am 
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What I ended up doing is to change the offending file extensions to mkv. I’ll have a more detailed process of what was involved in a thread in the Off Topic forum.


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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Sun Sep 12, 2021 1:58 pm 
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Windy wrote:
What I ended up doing is to change the offending file extensions to mkv. I’ll have a more detailed process of what was involved in a thread in the Off Topic forum.

And it can be found here -

https://forums.winstep.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11901

Thanks for sharing, windy. I'm sure there'll be plenty of others who'll find this useful.

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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 4:48 pm 
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I've since deleted the old user profile and replaced it with a new one, updated the bios, and reenabled about half of the files to their previous file extensions. Since that time, Xtreme has locked up only a few times with the COM Surrogate problem.

It recently generated an error reporting message about high CPU usage, but oddly enough, it was a separate issue from the COM Surrogate one. Jorge, did you receive it? It was sent via email directly from my PC via the error message.

I remember a long time ago you told someone to install a program that monitors the system that provides feedback on what program(s) is causing a Winstep program to crash/lock up. Please provide that program. It will be Xtremely (pun intended) helpful in finding the problem.


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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 6:11 pm 
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3rd party codecs (which are also responsible for creating thumbnails of media files) can sometimes be buggy and create crashing issues for applications that use them.

It's a pain because since it is the application that crashes, it unjustly receives all the blame. Worse, because the problem is in a 3rd party codec or DLL, it becomes a nightmare to diagnose and cannot be fixed, only worked around.

An example of such a problem was the MP3 codec saga a few years ago that prompted me to make MP3 files to be played OUTSIDE the main application as some buggy MP3 codecs were causing some really weird issues to appear. Once MP3 files started being played by the external Winstep applet (which plays the MP3 file and then exists), all issues in the main application stopped.

With so many possible interactions between applications and 3rd party software, sometimes I think it's a miracle how anything works.

Anyway, you can also control which file extensions *might* (or not) generate a thumbnail (provided the system/3rd party codecs offer this ability, of course) in Dock/Shelf Properties -> Behavior -> Advanced -> Thumbnail File Types

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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 6:49 pm 
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Jorge, the Directory Opus developers have, for a long time now, provided a way for users to give the developers a way to diagnose which third-party process might be locking up their software. As a file manager, Directory Opus invokes third-party system-installed plugins for thumbnails as well as viewing or listening to media. Since Opus, like Winstep, is just invoking these features via a system call, they have no control over the third-party software.

But, they use this "process snapshot" method to figure out which process is causing the lockup. This works best when the user runs it while Winstep is frozen...not crashed, unless the user knows for sure "if I do this, it WILL crash" then they can start the process capturing, perform the action that will crash Winstep, and then stop it.

Anyway, I thought this might be a useful way for you to help diagnose things for users. (Note, the resulting DMP file is rather large but is mostly text so it compress very well.) Here on Winstep, you can suggest people use something like WeTransfer (no account required) to send/post a link to the archived DMP files so you can download and diagnose.

https://resource.dopus.com/t/manually-g ... hots/34071

Almost every time, it's something the user needs to fix on their system (or have another developer fix), but at least you can help the user figure out which third-party software they can blame. :-)


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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 7:30 pm 
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Thanks for the tip, Ric! :D

I guess the 5 memory dumps are an attempt to catch whatever is malfunctioning WHILE it is malfunctioning.

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 Post subject: Re: Dock Crash and Lock-up
PostPosted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 10:06 pm 
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Yes. Sometimes the process dump doesn't catch the particular process at the "right moment." I gather the devs there compare things across dumps to verify which thing is misbehaving.


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