Random keyboard freeze

Help & Support
1

My laptop keyboard has been acting up for months. At random times, the delete key stops working, then the arrow keys, then most keys. Mouse is still ok. Then the same problem occurs with an external keyboard. The problem is never there on first boot, it requires a period of time. I thought at first it was due to the laptop heating up - but was only guessing.

Last week, Dell replaced keyboard and motherboard. Well, guess what, the problem is still there! So I looked harder. The freeze only occurs in DOPUS, not in any other open program! Closing dopus (with exit) does not make the problem go away in a new lister (although a re-boot does). But closing all dopus references in task manager (notably, dopusrt.exe), then restarting dopus seems to work - till it happens again hours? later.

So it seems clear to me its a dopus issue (sorry Dell!).

I searched here for quite a while, and cannot find a similar, resolved, issue. I am running WinXP SP3, and recently updated dopus to 9.1.2.0.349, from 9.1.1...something. However the problem was there before/after this update. I cannot link the problem to any specific directory (neither can I rule this out). No specific single file seems to routinely cause the crash. I cannot determine whether any plugin or extension is causing the crash because I mostly don't use any plugins. For example I have "Content Type" disabled, and never use dopus to view images, movies or audio. I have the 'out-of-the-box' plugins installed (except no rar or ftp handling) but no others. Should I inactivate them all? The difficulty is that I cannot reproducibly cause the crash to happen. It occurs at least 3 times a week, but i don't know what i did to initiate it. For example tonight, I am running dopus, outlook 2003, word 2003, acrobat 8 and a text program called textpad (ie, a bog-standard set of apps i run every single day on this machine). Nothing special, between starting Win and the tonight's crash.

Firstly does anyone have any thoughts on what might be wrong? Secondly, should i uninstall and reinstall?

I have had many years of happy dopus'ing, this is my first issue that I suspect is a software problem (although it might not be be caused by dopus, which may simply be the 'victim'). So thoughts and opinions would be welcome!

2

This FAQs might help:

[General slowdown or instability investigation steps)

[Crash, exit or high CPU when viewing certain directories)

3

Thanks abr, I have read both those before I posted. Some of the suggestions are impractical in my case, as they will take me weeks or months to work out - because the problem is intermittent - appears sometimes daily, sometimes not for a month. If I wait for a month on each point, it will be 2 years to trouble-shoot.

4

Have you floated any toolbars recently?

Opus can't interfere with your keyboard, but when you float a toolbar any hotkeys assigned to that toolbar automatically become system global rather than Opus-specific. For example, if you floated the standard Menu toolbar you would find that things like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V "stopped working" throughout the system, because Opus would now be trapping these globally.

5

Thanks Jon, interesting idea. This program never ceases to amaze and delight me. No, I did not float any toolbars - mainly because I did not know this was possible till now. I don't get system-wide problems at present, although earlier I did. It appears restricted to loss of keyboard functions related to arrow cursors, delete and F2 keys. However this is likely my perception, because they are the keys I use most. Switching to another app, and those keys work. If the problem is allowed to "run" for hours (ie I did not notice it or ignored) then it seems to affect typing in word as well, but I am not certain that was the same problem. Switching back to dopus and they don't work (untill I restart via Task Manager). My suspicion is on the file "dopusrt.exe" because thats the one I have to kill to restart "clean"? The main issue is I have to wait so long for the problem to re-occur.

6

Update: not a lot of progress so far.

I have uninstalled DOPUS twice. Each time I did a reg clean with 2-3 different programs (including CCleaner), rebooted from a cold start and did a fresh install. I saved my settings first and then re-applied them on the new install. No effect. I still get a DOPUS keyboard freeze after a period of uptime, usually after a few hours.

Next I started inactivating all plugins. Using Plugin manager I disabled all except PCX, Audio tags, JPEG 2000, text-file thumbnails and text. No effect. Still freezing - symptoms unchanged.

Today I disabled two more plugins - PCX and "Text-File Thumbnails". I don't want to get my hopes up, but its been stable all day so far. Maybe I am onto something. I suspect it is Text-File Thumbnails because i rarely if ever access PCX files - not sure i have any on my laptop anywhere.
In the meantime, can anyone tell me what Text-File Thumbnails does, and why I would need it?

7

Nevermind the question. Its in the helpfile of course.
"This plugin provides thumbnails for text-files. Apart from looking great, the thumbnails allow you to quickly see the first few lines of each file by either switching to thumbnails mode or hovering to generating a tooltip. You’ll also see text-file thumbnails in the Opus File-Replace dialog.
UNICODE text files, including Windows XP Registry files, are supported in addition to normal text-files and files inside of ZIP archives."

Why would it cause me freezes after so many years of good and faithful service? Assuming this is the culprit fo course - which I am not sure yet.

8

I really doubt that it's the textfile thumbnails plugin. It doesn't interact with the keyboard at all.

9

Thanks leo, noted. Any thoughts on which plugins might interact with keyboard??

(note the mouse is fine, and all mouse operations work fine with dopus after it freezes with respect to the keyboard).

With a darned intermittent problem, I have to wait days to see if i have a genuine solution..

10

I've got no idea to be honest. I can't think of anything which would affect the keyboard within Opus in a way that required restarting dopusrt.exe (rather than dopus.exe).

I'd look at stuff like keyboard/mouse drivers and tools like clipboard history managers (and anything else which installs a global hotkey). e.g. Logitech's mouse/keyboard drivers can have application-specific settings which get confused sometimes, but I've never heard of them (or anything else) actually breaking keyboard input entirely in a program.

Since it's not affecting anyone else I think you'll have to narrow things down further before any forum members will be able to suggest anything.

e.g. Work out exactly which processes have to be restarted to fix things.

See if some keyboard shortcuts still work. (e.g. does Alt-F4 still close the Opus windows? Can you type anything into the location field, say, if you click on it first?)

Tell us which other programs you have running in the background and which hardware/drivers you have. etc.

11

I might have lucked out. Not sure yet. I think my registry setting for txt files was incorrect. I re-associated .txt with my text editor, textpad, and things have settled down a lot. No more errors for 2 days so far. This may not mean the problem is gone, but is encouraging. I will monitor further and then turn the plugins back on later, if it proves stable. This might explain the issue, but I am no expert here.

There were no clipboard history managers or global hotkeys that I can think of, apart from google desktop search (Ctrl-Ctrl)
To restart, required no processes that I can figure out except dopusrt.exe. But not sure what else to look for.
When it freezes, no keyboard shortcuts worked at all in dopus, tried F1, F2, Alt-F4 etc, but fine if I select another app. I did not try typing in the locations box.

I will give you the other info you requested if things do not go well, but for now, just waiting for the crash "not" to happen again.

12

Final update - problem resolved: The problem was connected to incorrect file associations for .txt files. Not DOpus nor my keyboard at fault. I use a program for text editing called TextPad, which uses the .txt extension as its primary association. I uninstalled and re-installed that program. The problem has not happened again for a month now. Seems like its gone now.

I hope this resolution helps other people in the future. Not a dopus issue, but a file associations issue. I have had both programs on my PC for many many years without issue. So I can only assume it was a registry screw-up. I tried that first, by re-associating .txt with the right program. However that proved insufficient and the problem kept coming back untill a new install of TextPad.

13

I don't really see how a file association issue can make your keyboard stop working, but glad you have it fixed :slight_smile:

14

It makes no sense to me either. However, one issue that kept occurring was that double-clicking a text file would bring up the default notepad plus an error message. Despite re-setting associations again, this occurred every week or so. As I said above, reinstalling dopus had no impact on this, nor did registry cleaning, nor did reclaiming file associations from the other app. Only the reinstall did it. Even when this error did NOT occur (ie textpad opens just fine), the initial keyboard problem was still occurring. Also, on reinstall I upgraded textpad by a couple of versions - not sure if that was relevant. Thats the story, so my assumption is a registry mess up with file-associations. WinXP gets very old after 2 years, and a lot of junk goes in there?