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

While the new release is amazing, I seem to be completely unable to use the new "Group editing" feature (open a group for editing in a seperate window).

Each and every time I click on "Open" in the context menu, first a "serious" error occurs, then an "Extremely serious error" occurs, then another window appears and says something about the Runtime requesting the application to terminate in an unusual way or something along the lines...

(I wonder if there is an "Intergalactically serious error" too, or have I reached the end of the ladder? ;-))

I've agreed to the error log being sent to Xara, so, I hope they can fix it :)

Anyone else had this problem or know a workaround?

Maybe I should take this opportunity and completely remove and reinstall Xtreme for the first time in, like, a century ;)

Hi Alexander,
Just double-click the group you want to edit or select the group in the page&layer gallery and press Enter.
The right menu alternative is working fine here.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MEB

Hi Alexander,
Just double-click the group you want to edit or select the group in the page&layer gallery and press Enter.
The right menu alternative is working fine here.

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Hi,

that results in the same problem :(

Can you post the file to check if it´s anything related with that specific file or something specific to your computer?
Or at least a new file with only the group in question.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MEB

Can you post the file to check if it´s anything related with that specific file or something specific to your computer?
Or at least a new file with only the group in question.

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It happens even in a completely blank file. Just add 3 rectangles, group them, double-click the group, BOOM!

I guess I'll uninstall all Xara-related stuff and reinstall fresh, it's badly needed after 3 years or so...

Well it´s all working fine here. Maybe you should try a reinstall before taking any steps further...

Hi, which OS are you working on please?

Alexander -- happens to me too!

Have tried Windows Control Panel 'Repair', and re-booting ... no luck. Have a post going on Xara-Users forum about this. Otherss, just like here, are not having the problem. One difference -- it worked OK for me as a demo, but not after I purchased it. Have you bought your DP7 yet?

Yes, I have activated right away, before doing anything else. So I wouldn't know if it would have worked without activation.

Windows XP Pro x64 Edition

The last function that gets called before the crash is something like GetNumberOfItemsInView() if I remember correctly from the trace...

Here's the last bit of the strack trace, should a developer be listening... (note the curious 0x30303030 address...)

The crash happens *after* a new document window has been opened (the blank document is visible), but *before* its tab in the tab bar is drawn... the status line reads "Adding colors to document"...

30303030 ((module-name not available)) (function-name not available)
00A8970C (DESIGN~1) CColumnVTreeCtrl::GetNumberOfItemsInView
007ACC08 (DESIGN~1) ObjectGalleryDlg::DoEnsureAllLayersAreViewed
007B1FE5 (DESIGN~1) ObjectGalleryDlg::DoShowLayerMode
007B4418 (DESIGN~1) ObjectGalleryDlg::Message
00877F06 (DESIGN~1) MessageHandler::Broadcast
0059326B (DESIGN~1) Document::SetSelectedViewAndSpread
00949FAE (DESIGN~1) OpSubDocumentEdit::StartEdit
0094A1B8 (DESIGN~1) OpSubDocumentEdit::Do
007C4D35 (DESIGN~1) OpDescriptor::Invoke
007C5BB1 (DESIGN~1) OpDescriptor::Do
00C8DD4E (DESIGN~1) SelectorTool::HandleButtonUp

Thanks for providing this info. jon404 are you also using Windows XP Pro x64 Edition?

BTW, the bogus address in the last call is always different... sometimes it's 0x30303030, sometimes 0xffffffff, sometimes 0... however it always crashes upon returning from that getnumberofitemsinview thing...

IMPORTANT FINDING HERE - I just tried running Xara under an administrator account, and the crash DOES NOT HAPPEN THERE at all!

I guess that should make fixing easy ;)

Yes Alexander it means if you right click the desktop icon and select Run as Administrator (only needs to be done once) the program can register all the dlls properly.

Soquili: Yes, I know that, that's only a workaround though. Any "normal" application should be able to run properly under a restricted account.

Apart from that, I spent two hours customizing Xara to my workflow (keyboard shortcuts, toolbars etc.) - I'd need to repeat that process then.

You call Xara a "normal" application? :-O

When it can work rings around any other vector application? ;)

Just kidding. :)

However you may not have noticed the installation instructions on the web site:

;-)

Obviously, I have installed it using an administrator account.

(And Windows XP - which is what I am using - doesn't have UAC ;-))

Did you resolve the problem?

That is the most important thing, isn't it? :)

No, I didn't. As I said, I don't plan re-investing 2 hours in customizing the Xara installation. It's up to Xara to fix this, imo, really severe bug. But I'm sure they'll do that anyway :)

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.

Besides if you want to save your custom controlbar configuration simply click "Last XaReg update" link in my signature. The version of XaReg has the ability to save and reload your controlbar configuration.

Download the .zip file and extract XaReg.exe and put in in a convenient location on your hard drive.
Close any Xara apps you may have running.

Double click the program's icon to launch it and respond to the prompts. When the program displays itself you will see a list of the Xara Xtreme, Designer, Web Designer applications you have installed. Select the one you want to save controlbars then click the File menu > Save > Toolbar or simply use Ctrl+T. After a moment (less than a tenth of a second on my slowest computer) a dialog will display indicating the success or failure of the save operation. The default location is the same folder where you placed XaReg.exe. A failure should only occur if you are trying to saving to a nonexistant location or there is no room on the location. The save simply creates an .xml file with all the controlbar registry settings.

To load a saved controlbar .xml file you close any open Xara apps then run XaReg.exe and select the version that the data was saved from. Select File menu > Load > Toolbar or use Ctrl+B. A dialog will display when the registry has been updated with the saved data. Exit XaReg then run the Xara App. Your custom controlbars will be intact.

I use this when switching between the Dark UI and the Original UI for testing purposes.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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.

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).

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. :D

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Originally Posted by instinctive.de

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.

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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.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by instinctive.de

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.

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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

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Originally Posted by GerryI

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.

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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.

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

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

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... :confused:

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

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

This bug (bug 8894 in bugzilla) has now been fixed so the next update will not suffer from this problem.

Thanks to everyone involved in tracking it down.

Gerry

Thanks Gerry, it's great to have such direct communication with the developers of a commercial product. On top of that with such an amazing one (no kidding)>

You mentioned Bugzilla, is that to say that there is an official bugzilla for Xara Designer somewhere? If so, I've missed it :)

BTW: I'd love to help in fixing - I was one of the more active developers of Blender for a few years after it got open sourced - however I don't think you'll give me a contract ;)