Problems on Windows restart

DOpus replaces Explorer as my default shell. Normally everything works perfectly. And I mean perfectly - I love this software.

Anyway, about once a week something happens during Windows startup that means DOpus doesn't open. If I double click the desktop, or if I click on the DOpus icon on my taskbar, nothing happens at all. I checked the Windows task manager and I can see the usual DOpus entries there, but I still can't actually use them.

I used to have to restart Windows, which fixes it every time, but I got tired of that and so tried to manually restart DOpus. I did this by killing Explorer, and then killing dopus from the command line and task manager. I got the commands from this page: How to Exit Directory Opus

It didn't seem to work cleanly. Running "C:\Program Files\GPSoftware\Directory Opus\DOpusRT.exe" /CMD Close PROGRAM didn't seem to thoroughly stop all processes. I had to use the Windows task manager too, in conjunction with the command line. In the end I got all the processes to be killed, and when I restarted Explorer I was then able to restart DOpus.

I'd like to make a little batch script to run whenever I encounter this problem. Is there a rock-solid command I can use that will end all instances of DOpus?

If the process isn't responding to the command you're trying then there won't be a better option than killing it to restart it, since it must be hung & unresponsive.

While it is in an unresponsive state, you can create a dump file that we can use to analyze what's going on. This can be done by going to Task Manager, right-clicking dopus.exe and choosing the option to create a dump file.

The resultant file is usually quite large, but compresses well with normal zip.

The file may contain information such as usernames and filepaths on your machine. It probably won't contain much else sensitive information if it is hanging so early, but it's always a possibility, since dumps created in this way may include any data that the process was using. (Minidumps Opus creates by itself sometimes contain less data, for reference.)

For that reason, it's best not to attach the dump files to the public forum, but they can be emailed to leo@gpsoft.com.au if you'd like them diagnosed.

OK Leo, well thank you for the response. Next time it happens I'll try to kill it just with task manager, and will have a look at exporting a crash dump too.