venkum wrote:
Every time I safely eject a usb drive Workshelf is crashing. This is very frustrating because I have to start Workshelf over and over again several times a day. I tried to figure out the cause but so far nothing and finally gave up on it.
Yeah, that would drive me up a wall too. But I am not seeing that here, NEVER experienced such a thing in fact, and I regularly safely eject USB drives too.
At first glance I can't even imagine a correlation, since WorkShelf does not even keep an eye on active drives (that is something that would happen if we had a Disk Drives module, but alas, there is none yet).
Normally when that kind of stuff happens it is related to 3rd party software that injects buggy code/DLLs into other application's processes. Since the buggy code is running inside the application's own process space, if it crashes it brings down the application itself through no fault of its own.
For instance, I remember getting reports shortly after its release that v19.4 was crashing hard on SOME systems (and most of those reports came from German users! Strange, eh?).
After some back and fro, we managed to figure out that the crashes happened when the Winstep application tried to retrieve current weather information from NOAA via HTTPS (the METAR weather feed provider had recently switched from HTTP to HTTPS, and v19.4 was thus forced to support encrypted HTTPS connections too).
The user removing the METAR code for his location from the Weather Settings panel and relying on the other weather feeds instead would put an end to the crashes, but we still didn't know why it was happening on some systems but not others.
It took a long time, but eventually a correlation was found: the culprit was Acronis Active Protection, an anti-ransomware applet that Acronis, a company with literally zero experience in security software, decided to bundle with it's backup software Acronis True Image 2019.
The reason why so many German users were affected (as opposed to a random distribution among nationalities) was because Acronis True Image is VERY popular in Germany. Who could have guessed this when the reports first started coming out, eh?
The funny thing is that I too use Acronis True Image for my automated backups and have been doing so for years, but here I had disabled Acronis Active Protection prior to v19.4 due to issues with a game (Jedi of the Fallen Order) that I managed to track down to it, so I never experienced those crashes.
Now, this story obviously does nothing to solve your issue, but it might give you a clue as to what might be going on in your system. Normally it's either security software, drivers or codecs.
Another possibility is for a user also experiencing this problem to read this and chime in, making it a bit easier to zero in on the true culprit, as we eventually did with Acronis Active Protection.
venkum wrote:
PS Also, I'd like to buy an update to newer version. If I can get some additional discount on existing upgrade price that will be awesome.
Alas, in case you're not aware, the current prices are already HEAVILY discounted (and they will be returning to normal next week when v22.4 is released).
Back in 2019,
to celebrate Winstep's 20th anniversary, I decided to give both existing and new users a treat: for a limited period of time, prices were SIGNIFICANTLY reduced all across the board. This included upgrade renewals as well as new purchases.
This was supposed to last a year at the most, but then covid reared its ugly head and I kept the promotion going. What was supposed to last a year at the most ended up lasting 3 years (but it was mostly ok because with so many people being locked at home the higher volume in sales kind of compensated for the much lower prices).
However these promotional prices cannot be sustained any longer. It is no surprise to anyone that the cost of living is going through the roof, and that is affecting us all.
P.S. Also, I've sent you a PM.
Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2022 5:10 am 
