catastrophic weirdness

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John
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2009 8:27 am

catastrophic weirdness

Post by John »

I'm using br 4.32g with all my clients. I've recently integrated the fnsnap print grid routine and fileio and a little screenio. I don't know if any of those are related to the issue but here it is: I've had maybe half a dozen clients call me with what appears to be a stream of garbage characters typing all over, hitting Ctrl+P, beeping, etc. You can't get BR's attention, the only way to stop the flow is to end-task BR and start it over. It appears that perhaps the screen is being printed but to the console or gui-sole instead of to the printer. This seems to have occurred when users are looking at lists with the fnsnap print routine available in a button. They don't know what they did to start the storm and they can't get out of it without calling me.

Has anyone had any similar experiences like this? When they call they're always freaking out because their program is freaking out. And I haven't the foggiest clue on how to get it to stop occurring. Any ideas or similar experiences?

-John
John Bowman
Gabriel
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Re: catastrophic weirdness

Post by Gabriel »

Yes! That has been happening for me at one of my clients as well. It only happens to 3 of their end users.

We have been trying to figure it out but its difficult because nobody can reproduce it. We then installed the debug version of BR but it doesn't send a crash dump file or anything, it just totally crashes even in the debug version. We finally took to installing a key logger on the computer of the 3 users who run into this situation and we're hoping that the next time it happens we can review the key logger to determine exactly what is going on.

It seems to me like there is a memory leak in BR somehow, and random memory is being redirected as input from the keyboard. But it only happens on certain computers or with certain end users. Some of them think it has to do with certain key presses.

For us it happens even in programs that do not use fnSnap and even in programs that do not use ScreenIO. For example, it happens in the customers Main Menu which is just a really simple BR program that doesn't do anything too fancy. (it does remap keys though, so that might be involved, but not according to what we've seen in the log files so far. Incidentally, the ScreenIO designer remaps keys but the ScreenIO Runtime DOES NOT remap any keys so that wouldn't be the issue with your customers.)

Maybe now that more people are experiencing the issue we can get some momentum going towards getting a fix. Please let me know of anything else you notice about it. There's nothing in the log file and nothing that BR Debug can tell us .. I'll certainly let you know if we get it to happen again with the keylogger installed (it hasn't happened since we installed the key loggers).

Keep posting everything you notice about any patterns you see. The only way we'll get this one solved is to get enough information about whats going on, to find the pattern so that we can reproduce the issue consistently. And if you can reproduce the issue consistently, tell us right away please!

Gabriel
John
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2009 8:27 am

Re: catastrophic weirdness

Post by John »

I don't really think it's the screenio nor fileio - it really wasn't doing anything with it any of the times. And I have my doubts about the fnsnap. I do have one other suspicion. I (somewhat) recently added a line to my brsonfig.sys file that says:

Code: Select all

PrintScreen gui Win:/Select
I kinda suspect that it may have something to do with it. I added because users were requesting an easy way to print screens. Do you keep the same line in your config files?
John Bowman
Gabriel
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Re: catastrophic weirdness

Post by Gabriel »

We have PRINTSCREEN REPLACE NEWPAGE. Not sure what it means. It may have been in there from before I came along, or else I might have just forgotten.

Lets keep comparing notes though. We're bound to find the pattern eventually.

What kinds of computers are they? 64 bit OS? 32 bit OS? We just have to find the common denominator between the ones failing for my customer, and the ones failing for you, but which is not present in all the locations where it works.

Gabriel
John
Posts: 555
Joined: Sun Apr 26, 2009 8:27 am

Re: catastrophic weirdness

Post by John »

probably windows 10 OSs. That's what most of my customers are running. 64-bit standard versions. However I only use 32 bit BR because the 64 bit version of BR does not support the PDF stuff which I am still trying to get working sufficiently for me to start using it. But only 32-bit BRs are what they are using.
John Bowman
Gabriel
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Re: catastrophic weirdness

Post by Gabriel »

Ok. OS is probably not it then.

And as far as I know everyone is using 32 bit BR, for the same reason. I am, and this client with the trouble definitely is.

Gabriel
rvancura
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Joined: Mon Mar 21, 2011 10:52 am
Location: Cleveland, OH

Re: catastrophic weirdness

Post by rvancura »

John,

This happened to my end user twice yesterday. I went almost a month without it happening. I had installed a keylogger on the PC for the user who has experienced this issues the most. I was hoping that this issue may have been cause by a combination of key stokes. However, that doesn't appear to be the case. Per her key log, we tried to replicate the error unsuccessfully. We never experienced this issue until we upgraded to the latest version of BR this spring. I attached the key log and BR log that I captured yesterday. Maybe someone can spot something that I can't. This occurred yesterday at 8:21 and 15:41. You can see in the key log that my end user took a snapshot/screenshot after this occurred. "enter" was her last keystroke in the morning and "esc" was her last keystroke in the afternoon.

As I was writing this, I had an end user have this happen to them for the first time. It has happened to a total of 5 end users here (including when it first happened to Chris). Along with the logs, I'm attaching a Word document that has additional notes I made over the last few months.

-Ryan-
Attachments
ang BR log.txt
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ang key log.txt
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BR memory leak issue.docx
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Ryan Vancura
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