Yeah, that is from the backup crash. But I meant other warning entries, not just those related to the Winstep software.

Anyway, got your backup files on the Winstep support account, thanks, I'll have a look at them as soon as I can find some time. Still configuring the new machine after spending 12 hours straight shuffling hardware back and fro.

there are some, but nothing is crashing though, most of its apps reporting errors when i lose internet

something just ocured to me, could it be because not of 3party software, but because of the state of my registry, since my instalation is rather old (2 years 3 months)

but i dont think that is the case, since i just now tested both auto and manual backup and it went ok, restoration was also successful , so unless it starts up again, well never know

i guess it could be one of the shortcuts i removed in the meantime, only other change i remember making on the system was updating codecs, and some of the apps that are always running autoupdated too

Ok another update, it happened again, so i tried quitting all 3rd party software, same, but when i did a reebot and tried again it went ok, could it be tied to memory usage?

edit: after further testing it seems to happen if explorer* windows are open, need to confirm

*default windows file explorer - only modded with 'classic shell 4.3.1' that i can think of which i have been using for years and didnt cause problems before (if there is any other modification to explorer, its also ancient (since i first set up my os 2.5 years ago, and before that on my win7 laptop)

edit 2: Closing Explorer windows sometimes helps but not always

Well, first of all my apologies, literally a couple of days after receiving your backup file I got infected with covid and ended up forgetting all about this issue.

I just tried restoring your backup while running WorkShelf on the IDE (development environment), as this would pinpoint the line any error occurred, as well as on the normal runtime version.

No errors, no crashes. The only thing I got in both cases was a missing theme warning (normal since you're using a theme I do not have installed here).

The fact that it sometimes crashes and sometimes doesn't in your system makes it pretty difficult if not downright impossible to diagnose. Could be a hardware issue (RAM instability, for instance) or buggy 3rd party software in your system extending its tentacles to all other processes and thus interfering with WorkShelf.

This reminds me of the issue that led me to play all MP3 sounds (such as the clock and mail voices, etc) via a separate WsMMPlay.exe applet instead of directly in the main application itself, as buggy 3rd party audio codecs would otherwise corrupt the main application and cause it to eventually crash in an apparently unrelated manner.

This actually happened on your system back in 2017, REMEMBER? It took us two months and 12 forum pages to figure out the REAL culprit and come up with a fix.

Are you sure this is not more of the same and that WsMMPlay.exe is still running on your system whenever the Winstep application plays music or an announcement voice?

glad to hear you are better


did you install one of those that didnt save properly, or a clean backup?


ye, iu know i always have *special* bugs. its been a pita trying to pinpoint it as you can see by the posts and edits

only thing i can conclude now is that it 'sometimes' works when i close explorer windows, and it seems to 'always' work after a reboot, when all apps that i run on startup are running, but i havent started anything manually, which would lead me in direction that its ether one of the programs(explorer, waterfox(branch of firefox), tixati torren client, or gom player) or ram/virtual memory

do you have any winstep specific diagnostics that could catch more info about the crash itself?

i have now run 2 autobackups one after another, first went ok, then i started the video i had paused last night, and started second which crashed, then i killed GOM, waited a couple of minutes, and did another backup which was ok, so GOM *might* be the culprit

there are updates both for GOM (last updated in march) and K-Lite(last updated in april), but i will hold off on them if you want to dig deeper into this

event viewer doesnt show anything





nope, i update codecs regurarly, and its runing ok

Last backup file you sent me, so I think it was a clean backup.

I even tried running your AutoBackup IC from the IDE after importing your settings, but there were also no errors the 3 times I tried doing this.

However, your question above did prompt me to check the differences between your "good" and your "corrupted" WorkShelf backup. To my surprise the "corrupted" backup *appears* to have completed successfully judging solely by the last entry saved.

If that is the case, the crash seems to happen AFTER exiting the backup routine itself.

So, just to rule this out, can you email again a "corrupted" and a "good" backup file to the Winstep support address, please?



Unfortunately, no.



Nah.

This also kind of reminds me of the system instability I suddenly started experiencing on the new Alder Lake Windows 11 system. I haven't written about it in that article yet, but after running fine for the first few weeks the Windows 11 system started randomly rebooting or shutting down itself. No BSOD, no nothing, just puff, even when the system was idle (these type of issues are precisely the reason why I didn't want to upgrade my previous Windows 10 system to Windows 11).

At first I suspected the 6000Mhz memory (since there are issues with Alder Lake CPUs and DDR5), especially as the random reboots apparently went away after replacing those temporary (on loan) sticks with the final pair of Corsair Dominator 5200Mhz DDR5 sticks. But a couple of weeks later the system went back to behaving erratically, and it was getting worse and worse.

To this day I don't exactly know what fixed the issue, as I tried many things (including praying, that's how desperate I already was eheh), but luckily the system is now rock solid stable.

Perhaps there was an short circuit somewhere due to a pinched cable causing intermittent power issues which was resolved by moving hardware around, perhaps it was a conflict with monitoring software that stopped when I disabled EC (Embedded Controller) polling in both AIDA64 and Argus Monitor, perhaps it was some USB communication issue that one fine day out of the blue started causing Windows 11 to think the battery in my 2200VA APC UPS was critical and thus the system needed to be shutdown ASAP, despite it being currently running on AC Power (that was a funny one, solved by telling Windows not to do anything on a critical battery event if the PC is plugged in, doh!).

It got to a point were I was for a while convinced it was the rather innocuous CPU-Z application that was causing all the trouble (which just proves correlation is not causation)!

Computers...! I've said it repeatedly here, what surprises me are not the issues, but how so much different stuff - hardware AND software - manages to coexist peacefully most of the time.

ok gonna send you both most recent clean and crashed backups, but when i restore crashed backup i get this:



and my clock module is in completely wrong place, with wrong skin and size,
my cpu module has moved and is wrong size, and my ram module is missing, instead there is weather module.
also the sounds for workshelf are turned on, even though they were turned off.

when i restore from clean backup, everything is as it should be.

i know i modified clock graphics in its theme (just its .png file, nothing in confing afair), but im unsure about ram/cpu meters, i think i did one of them or both, cant remember.

got an upgrade of 2x8 gb RAM today, which im gonna install tonight, so i don't know if that will affect the behaviour of crashes if it was RAM related

compressed my themes are 23 MB so i can send them too if it would help

No, this has nothing to do with themes. The reason you get that warning when restoring the crashed backup is because a big chunk of data that should have been saved (default theme for docks, all settings related to modules) was NOT saved because the application crashed while making the backup.

However, I noticed something VERY strange: right after the point where a big chunk of data is missing, the Winstep application still managed to add a complete [SHARED] section. Not sure how that happened if the application crashed at the point where the big chunk of data is missing. Did you happen to press the Retry button in the WorkShelf Exception Handler dialog box?

Also, can you please send me ANOTHER file resulting from ANOTHER crashed backup (made after the ones you sent me)? Want to confirm it's crashing at the same point (or not).

ok, ill do it as soon as i stabilise my system, my pc guy told me i should update bios before installing aditional ram, and that went ok but it borked up my windows somehow so im fixing that atm

not sure anymore



sending fresh set

1st one before i started watching video in GOM, wenmt ok
then then i made one just after i started and paused video, went ok too

2. i made after watching for a couple of minutes and that one crashed, didnt press retry this time

Ok, so the fresh set crashed at a different place so it's not a problem with the backup routine per se (also, after looking at the code the fact that the [SHARED] section appeared after the point the backup crashed is actually normal).

I am using the WritePrivateProfileString API call to store the settings in the INI file, and given how it works I think the issue might actually be at system level (either memory or storage issues).

One way to solve this would be to emulate what WritePrivateProfileString does using my own code (I already do that for the equivalent API call when RESTORING from a backup) and given how slow WritePrivateProfileString is, this would not only solve your problem as it probably would also speed the backup operation TREMENDOUSLY.

This said, emulating it is quite complex and I can't run the risk of attempting that without extensive testing, given how critical this function is. Any attempt will have to wait until after the official release of v22.5.

seems i managed to somewhat stabilize my system finally
when i was flashing bios it offered to choose between fast and intact, the difference being that intact included Intel management engine, i couldnt find any useful posts or explanations, so i mistakenly chose intact

turns out that it was optimized for w11 and is known to crash existing w10 installations, but my google fu wasnt good enough to get that info beforehand (still arent able to find that info online, my hardware guy learned it somewhere)

it kept BSOD-ing ether at boot,login or randomly, managed to get into safe mode and revert to old driver version for ME, so far so good, but only time will tell

my screen still sometimes flickers as if resolution is changing (randomly) which causes workshelf to disappear, even though i updated my drivers, so def steel needs work, maybe even a clean install (which im SO not in the mood for)

Well, let's wait and see then.

Wasn't aware of that Fast/Intact option when updating the BIOS. After a quick read about it seems specific to Gigabyte motherboards, no?

Yes, they also have dual bios, so if something goes wrong with primary, second one kicks in, unfortunately that doest help with this update, bc it specifically was made not to be downgradeable(supposedly bc of a big security patch, but i have a nagging suspicion MS had their fingers in that).

Ther IS a chance my existing RAM is faulty and causing this. Replaced it with new modules, backed everything up that was on c: and now wait and see