DOpus just stops working

Hi!

Whilst I would find it hard to live without DOpus, there is one extremely annoying issue with it that I've never been able to solve (and yes, I've read the FAQ). Every now and them, seemingly randomly, it just stops working and the swirly rotating hourglass replacement appears. If I click anywhere on DOpus the screen goes milky white and I get the "Opus Directory 10 is not responding" message — sometimes, if I wait for 10 - 15 minutes it clears itself, sometimes it doesn't.

I am going slowly nuts trying to find some common factor which triggers this. The only thing which seems more likely to trigger it than otherwise is if another program such as a file shredder starts deleting or changing files in a directory which is currently open on the DOpus screen — but again, not invariably.

There are no crash dumps or anything which might help. The only thing which is perhaps unusual about my W7 Ult 64-bit setup with DOpus v10.5.4.0 bld 5080 x64 is that I'm running the Nvidia Surround system for a 5760 x 1200 screen (but the only hit on Surround I can find using the search facility refers to a multiline floating toolbar, which doesn't sound relevant).

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Brian

You didn't say which FAQ you checked, which steps you followed and what results were (if any, maybe none). I'm thinking particularly reltaing to process explorer/monitor steps described in what I think might be the more relevant FAQ: General slowdown or instability investigation steps

Some of the suggestions there might seem impractical (about eliminating possible contributing pieces, shell extensions, etc), but on the other hand it also depends how frequently it happens. If once every day, it shouldn't be too burdensome to turn lots of things off to see if there's a change in behavior.

unfortunately, without a crash dump being generated... not sure if anyone will be able to provide any more prescriptive steps to try ;-(.

Hi — and thanks for your reply.

I did indeed try the, er, less impractical steps in the 'General slowdown or instability' list, but none of them seemed to affect the issue at all. If only this problem happened once a day it would be less of a pain but it seems completely random, with nothing for days and then perhaps two occurrences in an hour— there's nothing I can correlate the failures with, no pattern at all that I can see. It's the worst kind of error to try and deal with (not least since it leaves no dumps or other traces)..... :frowning:

I was just hoping that someone here might have experience of something similar: thanks anyway, but it looks as though I'll have to downgrade to using one of the competition, sadly. A real pity.

Cheers,

Brian

The suggestions, however "impractical" they may seem, are there for a reason...

[quote="brian747"]Hi — and thanks for your reply.

I did indeed try the, er, less impractical steps in the 'General slowdown or instability' list, but none of them seemed to affect the issue at all. If only this problem happened once a day it would be less of a pain but it seems completely random, with nothing for days and then perhaps two occurrences in an hour— there's nothing I can correlate the failures with, no pattern at all that I can see. It's the worst kind of error to try and deal with (not least since it leaves no dumps or other traces)..... :frowning:

I was just hoping that someone here might have experience of something similar: thanks anyway, but it looks as though I'll have to downgrade to using one of the competition, sadly. A real pity.

Cheers,

Brian[/quote]
You haven't shared anything at all about what you have and haven't done from that (or any other) FAQ though.. so it's really tough to make any suggestions. I'm sympathetic to having to disable a bunch of stuff for a long period of time - but as Jon said, that stuff is there for a reason. I'm particularly curious if you've tried to glean anything from Process Explorer/Monitor. If the issue doesn't happen for days - but then may happen several times in a row... after the first time, you could leave some of those trace utilities open for a few hours and hope to have the issue again while they're open to see if your problem is do to a particular kind of file being accessed, etc.

Also, shell extensions are handy... but if you want HELP with a problem like this, you're going to have to make some changes to try and help yourself. For any shell extension based functionality that you use on a regular basis that might be impractical or burdensome for you to leave disabled for a week at a clip to try and narrow down your problem... perhaps there are some things we can do to give you alternative ways of using those features (buttons, context menu, hotkeys, etc) so you just have to change how you use them instead of doing completely without them for a long stretch of time.