BUG: "Extremely serious error" when trying to "Open" a group

[Soquili]

Alexander it is up to Windows to fix it rather than Xara. The problem is that many computer manufacturers and Microsoft install things that can cause any application to have issues unless they are run as Administrator.

The real complication is find out which apps are affected and which are not. Sometimes the same model machine with the same version of Windows installed will affect different applications.

Running any version of Linux is even more complicate because different apps (and updates for apps) often require different versions of support files.

[instinctive.de]

Soquili, thanks for your very detailed post.

I appreciate the XaReg hint. I've always edited the registry directly to make those changes, but in this case, it's probably much more convenient to use your utility (or in general, I assume )

Still, I don't agree with you on the administrator/non-administrator thing.

There are so many applications that I use that are also extremely complex and large, and work flawlessly when installed as admin and run as a normal user. Xtreme always had issues with this.

After all, it's Microsoft themselves who recommend running all applications as a restricted user under Win XP.

To me, it seems that this "Edit Group in seperate document" thing tries to save a temporary file somewhere to open it later, and this "somewhere" is probably in the Program Files \ Xara directory, which it obviously can't write to when running as a restricted user, and there's probably no check in the code for the success of that write operation. But that's just pure speculation.

Anyway, seeing how everything else works under a restricted account, I can't imagine this to be so hard to fix.

So, before the next update for version 7, I would really appreciate some developer looking into this thread and using the provided information to devise a fix.

Anyway, thanks for your help, it is much appreciated.

[instinctive.de]

BTW Bill, XaReg doesn't seem to work for transferring settings between accounts.

I've run XaReg as the 'normal user' account and saved both 'Settings' and 'Toolbars', then logged in with an administrator account, ran XaReg again and loaded both settings and toolbars from the previously saved files, but upon running Xara, it still had the default settings/toolbars (not the ones I customized and saved using the normal user account).

[Soquili]

That is very interesting Alexander. I always use an Administrator account on my computers and disable UAC on Vista and Windows 7. Microsoft seems more interested in helping 3rd parties to sell their addons rather than actually protecting a customer from themselves with UAC. Most users will simply click the OK button when the UAC prompts for permission to run.

Besides it is a very old habit using an Admin account because I provided desktop support, and Network Engineer/Administator support for several corporations since Windows has existed.

If I take a notion to update XaReg again I will explore the 'normal' and 'admin' account differences.


EDIT: The CURRENT_USER area of the registry is associated with a specific user and will not properly apply to a different user account. Something to find a "work around" to accomplish.

[GerryI]

To me, it seems that this "Edit Group in seperate document" thing tries to save a temporary file somewhere to open it later, and this "somewhere" is probably in the Program Files \ Xara directory, which it obviously can't write to when running as a restricted user, and there's probably no check in the code for the success of that write operation. But that's just pure speculation.

Yes, that is pure speculation and totally inaccurate. The edit inside feature does not create any sort of temporary file and the fact that it works when run as administrator doesn't make much sense given how it does actually work.

So, before the next update for version 7, I would really appreciate some developer looking into this thread and using the provided information to devise a fix.

Please be assured that we are looking into this problem. It would help if we could actually repeat the problem but the dump file has given us something to go on and I am hopeful that a fix will be included in the next update.

Gerry

[instinctive.de]

Yes, that is pure speculation and totally inaccurate. The edit inside feature does not create any sort of temporary file and the fact that it works when run as administrator doesn't make much sense given how it does actually work.

Well, I couldn't make much sense of the "only works with admin privs" thing either, so that is why I speculated that way.

Of course, it might also be because under the admin account, Xara has different settings and toolbars and so the bug might not be triggered because of one of those.

If you can give me any hints on what to do in order to nail down the bug, I'm all ears. This release is amazing and I'm absolutely willing to help further if I can.

[GerryI]

Hi Alex,

Yes, I believe the difference between admin and non-admin for you is in how the page and layer gallery is configured (that is where the crash is happening). I can get a very similar crash to the one in your dump if I have the "layers" button in selected in the gallery. Do you have this button selected? If so, can you try it without this button selected?

Thanks,
Gerry

[instinctive.de]

Heh, yes, that's it, Gerry! When I select "Pages", I can open the group without problems.

[GerryI]

Good news, thanks for the report and helping to diagnose it. Now I just have to work out why it is crashing and how to fix it...

Could the other person who was having the same problem confirm that they also have the layers button selected in the page and layers gallery?

Gerry

[mwenz]

Gerry, yes that prevents the error.

And once depressed, as long as I do not click on the layer button, I can edit happily away, adding layers, etc.

Thank you. Mike