program freezing

[barrenjoey]

I downloaded the most recent beta version for Windows yesterday. All my writing friends seem to rave about their Mac version, so I was excited to have it help me edit my completed manuscript. I imported my mss to Draft and divided it into 36 chapters as sub-categories. I then used the synopsis beside each chapter and it populated the corkboard. I spent many hours doing this before saving and closing it for the night. Today, I try to open the program and it opens to the corkboard and freezes. Nothing I do helps. I used ctrl+alt+del, which showed it was unresponsive and also inexplicably opened 30-40 task managers, as if I had repeatedly pressed ctl+alt+del, when I had only done it once or twice. Nothing else worked on my computer, everything had frozen - Explorer, Outlook, documents - so I had to shut down.

When I started the computer again and opened Scrivener, the same thing happened. I want to love this program as much as my friends, but I am so frustrated and discouraged by the time and work I put into this and can't access. Please help!

[StaceyUK]

You can access your work even if you cannot use Scrivener.

1. Open your project's .scriv folder.
2. There should be a Files subfolder.
3. Each individual document or folder is saved as an rtf file usually as a number.

That should allow you to access your work while we try and troubleshoot why the program is freezing on you.

[barrenjoey]

Thanks Stacey. At least I know it's saved, but it's an awkward way to access files and not conducive to working within them this way. I look forward to learning if you can provide an answer and resolution for me.

[MimeticMouton]

Hi barrenjoey,

I'm sorry you're running into problems. The behavior you're experiencing certainly isn't normal! If it's under 20MB, you can zip the .scriv project folder and send that to support AT literatureandlatte DOT com and we can take a look at it to see if there's something in the project itself that's causing the crash. It would also help to know your computer hardware specs (type and speed of the processor, RAM size) and what version of Windows you're running.

Lee's working on boosting performance, and I know there's a slow-down/hang that can happen when trying to load a lot of lengthy documents (upwards of 80K words) in a Scrivenings session, but I haven't seen this problem with loading the corkboard for the same documents, so we'll need to look into this. Incidentally, what type of file was the manuscript you imported--.doc, .rtf, something else? I doubt it's related, since you were able to import and work in the project the first time without issues, but there are still some import bugs so it's worth checking.

[barrenjoey]

Hi Jennifer,
Thanks for continuing to brainstorm this. I left it alone for a day, but came back today and the same thing happened. I am able to work in chapters, but when I went to the Draft folder (where the whole mss is) and tried to switch between corkboard and manuscript, that's when it froze again. When that happened it also froze other programs, so that the Task Manager suddenly said other programs are not responding and it appeared that I had opened 30 or more Task Managers, which I had not done. I had to close them all as well.

I originally uploaded a complete mansucript that was around 88K. It was a Word 2003 doc file. My system is Windows XP.

I really like the concept and features of Scrivener, so I would love for it to work for me. Your persevence is much appreciated. Please let me know if there is any other information that would be helpful to you.

Deborah

[garpu]

Wild-ass guess, here, but have you run a spyware scan recently? That can make systems run erratically.

[barrenjoey]

It did occur to me, thanks, so I ran a scan, but nothing has shown up. I'm still a bit suspicious, but everything seems to work fine when Scrivener is closed.

Opened up Scrivener again today. Last couple of days it has been opening up fine and I can work within the chapters, but as always it froze again if I try to click on Draft in document form. It is okay in corkboard, but switching between the two is not possible. I have to ctrl+alt+del and close it down. I've learned not to keep clicking everything or try to navigate to anything else and I can eventually just close Scrivener without shutting down the computer, but obviously this isn't ideal.

[EdwardOwen]

I haven't had anything to report for some time (a good thing) but I'm back and this post sounds similar to problems I have been having. I have v29 on Windows XP working on a mss that was started in v24 or 25. Everything has been working well until this latest download. Scrivener takes a VERY long time to load with this project (45K words). I will eventually work, but I have to go away and make a sandwich, do laundry, climb Mt. Everest.... you get the picture. I have run all of my antivirus/malware programs and nothing has changed. There is 48G of free memory on my hard drive. This is a Toshiba laptop w/ a Pentium 4 240G processor w/ 4M of RAM. Up until v29, Scrivener has performed beautifully.

Then I asked a friend at work and we cleared out the temp and cache files (thought this had been done when I ran CCleaner the first time) and now the program is loading much quicker. However, switching between a single chapter and the entire mss seems to take longer than it should. As always, love the program and looking forward to a bigger, faster, stronger Scrivener.

Edward Owen

[EdwardOwen]

.... and now it is back to taking forever to load.... sigh.... Whoops! its up now, time to write. Hope there is a fix for this. Thnx

Ed