UE closes immediately when opened

Post Reply
MJones
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Sep 10, 2005 9:08 pm

UE closes immediately when opened

Post by MJones »

Hi. UE closes immediately when opened, even with the latest version 5.21 (64 bit). There are no errors, and I can't find where it writes a log or anything saying what is wrong. It was working, nothing changed that I know of, now it doesn't. Please advise. Thanks.

More: I've also tried the uncompressed version of UE.exe, and excluding from the AV. Same results. I even tried a backup with just the exe and a current version or and older copy of the Settings folder from a backup. It recreates the folder structure and some of the files like the map.txt and tm subfolder, then immediately exits without warning. I'm stumped.
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Re: UE closes immediately when opened

Post by alex »

And what about 32 bit the same? There may be the log.txt file in the UE database directory, check if there is something there.

Can you try to uninstall the antivirus temporarily?
MJones
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Sep 10, 2005 9:08 pm

Re: UE closes immediately when opened

Post by MJones »

The 32-bit version probably wouldn't support my newsgroups sizes, but I tried it. Same result. No attempts created a log.txt. Launching changed many other files, including the reg.dat, and rolled over the current version of it to overwrite the older versions, which is unfortunate. That's why I grabbed the older versions from backups and tried them to see if it was corruption of the latest reg.dat. Even with the .oldest reg.dat it caused this odd crash, but that didn't seem to make sense, since that file is nine months old. UE has started fine countless times since then.

Uninstalling the antivirus didn't help. I didn't expect it to, since the program started if I renamed the entire UsenetExplorer data folder temporarily and launch UE and let it create a whole new data folder. Of course, I didn't want to lose all my newsgroup configuration and start over. I tried putting the blank config reg.dat into the original data folder and launching. That gave a message that there are newsgroups in map.txt not in reg.dat. Retry just exited, and Ignore isn't good because I didn't want to lose dozens of newsgroup names added and have to manually rebuild everything. So I renamed the Newsgroups subfolder and made a temporary new one, and dropped tm and map.txt and copies of a few small newsgroup numbered folders into it, and started UE with a fresh version of reg.dat. So I could try Ignore. I did that. UE then asked am I sure, I answered yes, and it still immediately crashed. Then I tried putting back a copy of the .oldest reg.dat as reg.dat, and copied all the other settings files from the temporary fresh copy of the UE data folder over the files in the Setting folder (after making a copy). It still crashed on startup. Odd.

One last try: I copied my good Newsgroups folder and whole Settings folder into the temporary new/empty data folder and changed the data path in the registry. It worked and everything was there. Closed UE. Renamed the folders so the new data folder has the original name, and changed the registry data path back. Still works. CHKDSK shows no problems, and security permissions on the two folders were the same. So I have to presume something was corrupt in some subfolder besides Settings and Newsgroups, though there's not a lot else there what with empty Downloads, Par2, and Import.

So it appears fixed, at least for now. In more than 10 years of using UE, I've never seen such an odd problem and such a harsh quiet crash. If there is anything I can check that might help to isolate the crash cause so that the code can be adjusted to avoid it or at least alert about it or log it, let me know. Thanks.
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Re: UE closes immediately when opened

Post by alex »

Sorry for the late reply.

Do you have still the copy of the crash database and can reproduce it?

I could add diagnostics on start to see where exactly it terminates.
MJones
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Sep 10, 2005 9:08 pm

Re: UE closes immediately when opened

Post by MJones »

Yes I do. I'd be willing to give it a go. Actually, the problem has returned today, so reproducing it with a debug version will be easy if it could be done soon. If not, I'll have to go about trying to fix it again by shuffling files/folders around like last time. Thanks.
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Re: UE closes immediately when opened

Post by alex »

You can rename the database folder, then create the original name folder and restore the database there e.g. by copying settings only from the affected renamed folder.

Then to test you can rename the recreated folder to a temporary name and rename the old folder to the original name.

Did you try to scan for bad sectors?
MJones
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Sep 10, 2005 9:08 pm

Re: UE closes immediately when opened

Post by MJones »

Yes, that is how I've been recovering from it.

I've done chkdsk /f /r. It found no problems, and there are no bad sectors reported when running chkdsk afterward. The problem has happened after short power failures caused the computer to reboot. Normally I run with a UPS, but it failed, and I'm waiting on a replacement. UE wasn't doing anything at the times though, it was just minimized.

Presumably I've got whatever file(s) are damaged that cause UE to just close itself while starting, since I've kept the old UE data folders with other names. The one from the first problem is nearly 700 MB, because it contains everything but Newsgroups. That's why it seemed easier to run a debug version of UE here and return trace or debug log results, unless you know a particular file that is likely to be suspect.

Thanks.
alex
Posts: 4514
Joined: Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:57 pm

Re: UE closes immediately when opened

Post by alex »

As the problem disappeared there is nothing to test.

It could still be it was some system issue with a database file.
Post Reply