Hi,

since a few days I notice a high cpu-load using nexus ultimate, the other product, winstep extreme, is not installed; perhaps it was installed for testing, but was already uninstalled.
Today I reinstalled nexus ult. (with prior uninstalling) but this did not helped!

Together with this high cpu-load I see many, ten, 15 o 20 instances of WinstepXtreme.exe (seems to be the current one v12.2.0.61) running. Killing them via Taks-Manager resolves the problem and everything is fine - for the next 30 minutes or hours...
System is a Win7 64 bit Ultimate...

Thanks in advance + greetings - Andreas

That's a new one...
There must be some setting that causes Winstep to be run a lot of times. I wouldn't dare make a guess, since it could be anything, but I'd check your autorun settings -- running "msconfig" might reveal the problem.
Other than that, I have no clue as to what could be running Winstep continuously.

Hi Skagon,

thanks for your replay, but this problem belongs to WinSteps Nexus Ultimate, not Winstep Extreme, therefore I'm a little confused that this exe is actualle existing in the directory...
Jorge: What does this program do - for Nexus?
Furthermore this problem occures not at the windows-start, it needs some minutes or hours until it happens. And this occurrence is not - immediately - depending on a click on Nexus.
Today this happens two times, after killing all WinstepXtreme.exe for the 2nd time it runs fine for hours.

And an autostart-entry (or so) for WinstepXtreme.exe doesn't exist.

Greetings - Andreas

Hi,
just to let you see the 'dimension' of this issue - 100% cpu load on a i5...
A quick screenshot from 5 minutes before...

Greetings - Andreas

Thanks for posting this on the main board as I asked, Andreas!

First don't be fooled by the name, 'WinstepXtreme.exe' is used in Nexus free, Nexus Ultimate and Xtreme alike, and in restrospect (isn't that always 20/20 vision?) it should have been named 'Winstep.exe'. That's because it is a small, *multi-function*, executable which is used as a 'helper' utility by the main Nexus free, Nexus Ultimate, NextSTART or WorkShelf applications.

What it does when run depends on the command line switch used to execute it.

Without a command line switch it is used to simply launch NextSTART and WorkShelf at the same time, but it is also responsible for 1) registering the applications when you double click the Winstep license key file, 2) appropriately install a Winstep theme when you double click the theme file(and tell the main applications to apply it if necessary), 3) convert a zip file to the '.xtreme' theme format and vice-versa, 4) attach a file to a Shelf tab when you right click on it in Explorer and select 'Send To WorkShelf' from the context menu, and, finally, as a way to periodically check the number of files in the Windows Recycle Bin without the main application temporarily blocking if the Recycle Bin is too full.

I suspect it is this last function that is causing the problem in your particular case.

What is weird about this is that in all the above cases WinstepXtreme.exe is designed to run, do it's thing and *immediately exit*. I never heard of WinstepXtreme.exe hanging before, which is why I asked you to post on the main board, to see if someone else is having this problem too.

WinstepXtreme.exe checks the number of files in the Windows Recycle Bin with a simple call to the SHQueryRecycleBin Windows API function. Once it has this information, it sends a Windows message to the main application to inform it of the result. This way, if SHQueryRecycleBin takes a long time to enumerate all files (and their sizes) in the Recycle Bin, the main applications don't remain 'frozen' until the function returns - it's a simple alternative to multi-threading but without any of its problems.

So, my guess here is that the call to SHQueryRecycleBin is blocking, thus never returning control to the WinstepXtreme.exe executable and in turn preventing it from exiting. Eventually Nexus Ultimate needs to know how many files are in the Recycle Bin again, runs another instance of 'WinstepXtreme.exe' (which ends up blocking too) and you end up with this mess.

Are you running any kind of Recycle Bin management or replacement software?

I have the exact same issue, My machine in only 2 months old Windows 7 64 bit fully patched to date via MS update.

I get somewhere in the number of 36 instances of WinstepXtreme.exe 32bit running in the process explorer before the machines locks up due to too few resources.

I have the free nexus toolbar installed, can I simply rename the file out of the way, what functionality would such action kill?

Please don't do this, I want to fix things, not work around them. Send me an email to the Winstep support address and I will work together with you to understand what is going on and fix it for good.

Unfortunately I never heard back from Andreas above, which is why this issue has remained a problem for others (no idea how many users are actually affected by this without knowing or reporting it). Eventually I forgot all about this problem, until now - so lets you and I not let that happen again.

I identified (and fixed) a spot where WinstepXtreme.exe could potentially block with high-cpu usage and never return. It shouldn't happen unless the SHQueryRecycleBin function fails, but we know all about these 'it shouldn't happen'.

Get it touch with me at Winstep support and I will send you a replacement WinstepXtreme.exe to see if that solves the problem.

For anyone suffering from this problem: next release (v15.8 ) will fix the issue for good.