OpenOffice on OS/X now consistently dies about thirty seconds after you start it ...
This just started recently happening on my OS/X box: the latest version of OpenOffice, with the latest version of the Java JRE installed, very consistently crashes crashes about thirty seconds after it has been started – even if you do absolutely nothing. (Just start the program and wait. Don't do anything.) It's always about the same amount of "survival time."
I have not thoroughly investigated this matter yet, but I'd be curious to know if this sort of issue has lately been happening in any other contexts, such as Linux. For many years, OpenOffice has been nothing but rock-solid, and so I really don't know what has disrupted it now. Especially, "in this way." (Again: "don't 'do' anything.") Which, to me, is very unusual ... (Of course, I've tried things like "discarding preferences files.") This began happening just a few weeks ago and right now I really can't tie it to any particular contemporary change. Before I knuckle-down to try to actually debug this thing, "is any of it familiar?" Any vendor problem-reports I should look at? |
Maybe a dodgy/dying ram chip, warms up & throws a wobbly(?) - I think I'd check that first.
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I am a long term user of open office. I am using slackware64 15.0 on a sony vaio. I do not have this problem. Making two votes for dogy hardware on your system.
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Since I have several independent user-ids on this system, I have determined that the problem does not occur on any of the other ones.
After having (by the command-line) purged all files and directories which resemble "*ffice*" and "*acle*" for this user, I remain puzzled. Examination of system logs, even as an Administrator user, shows nothing. However, I now know that the application is failing because of something that is particular to this user, although I have not yet identified it, nor found the application failure-log. |
I finally discovered a root-owned directory, ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports (notice: in my home directory), which contained the clue which finally enabled me to solve this. (After I used godly powers to chown it ... I have no idea why it didn't belong to me.)
The crash turned out to be related to "automatically check for updates." When I turned this option off, the problem went away. Of course, I promptly reported it to their version of BugZilla ... Code:
Thread 5 Crashed: |
Thanks for reporting back - interesting 'feature'. :D
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I guess the programmers forgot the mantra of "always wrap things in a try ... catch block!"
When the check-for-update logic threw an exception, it was never caught, so it busted out the top and blew the whole program very-ungraciously out of the water. Of course what I should have seen is a nice dialog-box which says, "Oops, the check for automatic updates unexpectedly failed due to a runtime error. [OK]" Like any sensible piece of professional software would do. I immediately reported the problem to their Bugzilla with a comment to that effect. I really don't know how they missed this. "Things can go wrong!" |
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