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Crash when loading latest version of Pathfinder

Fixed the other issue by deleting the Community Bestiary files. They were preventing Hero Lab from loading my other user files.
 
Fixed the other issue by deleting the Community Bestiary files. They were preventing Hero Lab from loading my other user files.

What could also be done is going to the editor to delete the "Yrthak, Boreal" race from the AP51 file in the Community Bestiary; even if HeroLab has gone into safe mode, you can still access those files in the editor. That will get rid of the problem without having to remove all the Comm Bestiary files (or at least it did for me)

EDIT: See this post for an update / correction
 
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What could also be done is going to the editor to delete the "Yrthak, Boreal" race from the AP51 file in the Community Bestiary; even if HeroLab has gone into safe mode, you can still access those files in the editor. That will get rid of the problem without having to remove all the Comm Bestiary files (or at least it did for me)
That worked
 
Baraccus, try the rollback file in my post at the top of page 2 - that should get you up and running while we sort out this problem permanently.

Oops, never mind, saw you're already trying it. We have some ideas as to what could be causing this and will be putting out a beta soon to try and hopefully fix the issue.

That would be great. I definitely want to get my hands on the items in that new update. :D
 
Could someone who has run into the crash problem please do the following? I'm still unable to reproduce the crash here, and I'd be very interested to hear what happens if you did this:

1) Download the latest Pathfinder data file (v7.7) from the updates mechanism and import it. (Don't worry, after you're finished with this you can import the "rollback" version again to get back to normal.)

2) Load the Pathfinder files. They should cause a crash like they did before.

3) Relaunch Hero Lab and load any other game system (for example, the Authoring Kit Sample game system).

4) Go to Tools -> Explore Folders -> Program Data Folder. An Explorer window should open.

5) Navigate to the "data" -> "pathfinder" folder inside the explorer window

6) Find the file "FGGTomeHC.pkg". What size is this file?

7) Delete the "FGGTomeHC.pkg" file.

8) Go back to Hero Lab and load the Pathfinder game system. Do you still get a crash?

It'd be really helpful if you could let me know the results to steps 6 and 8. Thanks for your help!

(Once you've done this, you can import the "rollback" version and go back to using Pathfinder again.)
 
Could someone who has run into the crash problem please do the following? I'm still unable to reproduce the crash here, and I'd be very interested to hear what happens if you did this:

1) Download the latest Pathfinder data file (v7.7) from the updates mechanism and import it. (Don't worry, after you're finished with this you can import the "rollback" version again to get back to normal.)

2) Load the Pathfinder files. They should cause a crash like they did before.

3) Relaunch Hero Lab and load any other game system (for example, the Authoring Kit Sample game system).

4) Go to Tools -> Explore Folders -> Program Data Folder. An Explorer window should open.

5) Navigate to the "data" -> "pathfinder" folder inside the explorer window

6) Find the file "FGGTomeHC.pkg". What size is this file?

7) Delete the "FGGTomeHC.pkg" file.

8) Go back to Hero Lab and load the Pathfinder game system. Do you still get a crash?

It'd be really helpful if you could let me know the results to steps 6 and 8. Thanks for your help!

(Once you've done this, you can import the "rollback" version and go back to using Pathfinder again.)

File Size 8,454 kb.

Restarted Hero Lap and it crashed.

Here is the error
HeroLab.exe has encountered an error and needs to close.

Please email a DESCRIPTION OF WHAT YOU WERE DOING, in as much detail as possible, along with this message, to support@wolflair.com. PLEASE NOTE: Unless you tell us what you were doing, we won't have enough information to fix this problem!

Right click and choose "Copy to Clipboard" to copy these details, or you can find them in this file: C:\DOCUME~1\TAMIAN~1\LOCALS~1\Temp\lwderror2912.txt

C:\Program Files\Hero Lab\HeroLab.exe
4.1a 349

major: 5, minor: 1, build: 2600, platform: 2, version: Service Pack 3, spmaj: 3, spmin: 0, suitemask: 00000100, type: 1
ACCESS VIOLATION
Address: 0x005ab17d
Type: bad read

Running Win XP media center - SP3
 
Oddly enough, after the update, I was able to run HL with the v7.7 files on both my XP machine and my Vista machine. Earlier today I experienced crashes on my XP machine and rolled it back.

FGGTomeHC.pkg is reading as 8,656,693 bytes on both systems as well.
 
Both of you guys deleted the FGGTomeHC.pkg file before you launched Hero Lab again, right? And it still crashed?
 
Here's something else I'd appreciate if someone could try:

1) In Hero Lab, go to Tools -> Diagnostics and check "Enable Debug Tracing"

2) Go to Tools -> Explore Folders -> Program Data Folder. An Explorer window should open.

3) Quit and restart Hero Lab.

4) Download the latest Pathfinder data file (v7.7) from the updates mechanism and import it. (Don't worry, after you're finished with this you can import the "rollback" version again to get back to normal.)

5) Load the Pathfinder files. They should cause a crash like they did before.

6) In the Explorer window you opened in step 2, there should be a file named "HeroLab.log". Please email me that file to colen@wolflair.com.

Hopefully the log file will have enough info about what happened to help us fix the issue. Thanks for your help!

(Once you've done this, you can import the "rollback" version and go back to using Pathfinder again.)
 
Both of you guys deleted the FGGTomeHC.pkg file before you launched Hero Lab again, right? And it still crashed?

Yes I did.

Edit 1: In the process of updating and then I will generate the log file you requested. You should see it in your email soon.

Edit 2: email sent with log file attached.
 
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I've just uploaded a V4.1b release for Hero Lab. This includes a bug fix for the crash issue, so once you download it, you should be able to use the V7.7 Pathfinder data files as normal. (Note that this release is Windows only, as the bug didn't affect people running OS X.)

Thanks for everyone's patience while we got this issue worked out!
 
I've just uploaded a V4.1b release for Hero Lab. This includes a bug fix for the crash issue, so once you download it, you should be able to use the V7.7 Pathfinder data files as normal. (Note that this release is Windows only, as the bug didn't affect people running OS X.)

Thanks for everyone's patience while we got this issue worked out!

Professional curiosity (software QA)... what was the problem?
 
I'm going to take a guess.

Since this is the same error I saw when I put in a bmp with color palette included, that possibly a library was changed that deals with bitmaps?


BoomerET
 
There were several things going wrong, none of which was a big problem in itself, but together they caused the crash. They were:

1) A table on one of the Pathfinder tabs now starts off much larger than it used to be. It's later resized down to only the space it needs, but it now starts off "huge" as opposed to "normal size". (This is why the crash only occurred when you loaded Pathfinder - the tables are much smaller in our other game systems.)

2) When a scroll bar was created, it reserved the memory necessary to draw itself with the dimensions it was created at. Since these dimensions were so much bigger now, much more memory was being allocated (something like 12.5mb of memory with the new size, which is a ridiculous amount for "drawing a scroll bar"). Windows 7 was apparently fine with this, but Windows XP and Vista, not so much. When this failed, creation of the scroll bar also failed.

3) When any table is created, it creates its own scroll bar of the same height. If creation of the scroll bar failed, a bad reference to the scroll bar was left lying around. Trying to access the bad scroll bar would cause a crash. Normally, if creation of something as simple as "a scroll bar" fails, that means everything is ruined and the application has probably crashed already, so we hadn't run into this problem before.

So the table is bigger, meaning more memory was needed, which caused creation of the scrollbar to fail, which left a bad reference in the table, which caused a crash for some users, which lived in the house that Jack built. :)

The fix was a) stop allocating very large amounts of memory we don't need to fix #2, and b) stop crashing if creation of the scrollbar fails in step #3. That means if something similarly weird happens in future, the scrollbar will just disappear, not crash the program.

The hard part was finding out exactly what was going wrong, which I was able to do thanks to a few users sending in debug logs to me. Thanks for your help, everyone who did that!

It was complicated by the fact that we had just released a new package (the tome of horrors) and a new version of Hero Lab (v4.1a), so our first assumption was that one of those things was responsible, and we spent a few hours combing through those before realizing that they had been unfairly accused. Phew...
 
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