Windows Task Manager needed to resolve frequent mysterious crashes.

[MSPhobe]

I work in Windows 10/ Libre Office 7.0.5.2 / Embedded Firebird… but similar problems go back years.

This is a poor question because I can’t give you the exact steps to get the crash. If I knew, I wouldn’t take them!

But it happens regularly. And is extremely disruptive, if you don’t know how to recover from it. (Merely “very disruptive” if you do.)

It may not be specific to these circumstances, but I seem to get hit by it most often when editing reports (and forms, tables, etc) in Base. They rarely if ever happen if I am in any other component of LO.

To get out without a full reset of my Windows… sometimes only otherwise possible with a long-press of the computer’s on/off button… open Task Manager. (Ctrl-Alt-Del will give you a way to do that.)

Under “Processes” click in any Libre Office lines, and then do “End Task”… one at a time. If one doesn’t do anything, try another until they are all gone. This will shut down any open LO document. You won’t get a chance to save unsaved work.

Your machine should work again now. Without a Windows restart (^_^).

I have no other app that regularly brings all of Windows down. I don’t think LO does this when I am using only Calc (not frequent) or Writer (used regularly). I’m not sure if it only happens when I am editing Base forms, reports, etc… the crashing has slowed my progress into using Base for routine work! (They also happened, as described below, using Open Office/HSQL. I’ve always (mostly) used the embedded database engines.)

After one of the crashes of which I speak, the next time you launch one of the LO apps, you’ll probably get the “LO has crashed…” dialog. So far, touch wood, the “recovering previous session” process has always “worked”, although recent work on things (since the last SUCCESSFUL “save”) may have been lost.

I stressed “successful” because…

I THINK the seeds of disaster are somehow sown during the save process. Even though the machine freeze-up occurs later… a nasty little “gotcha”. Another suspect for the cause of the crash is using the very convenient facility that LO offers that allows you to go back and forth between the design and run modes for things like forms and reports. When I always CLOSE something and then re-open it in the other mode when I want to go between modes, I seem to get the crashes less often.

Has anyone been near these circumstances? Have any further ideas for staying away from the crashes, even imperfect ideas, not guaranteed, like the one I set out in the previous paragraph? (In some sorts of work, these crashes can happen very frequently for me… to the extent that I start closing all open LO documents, restarting them BEFORE crashes, to see if the last “save” actually worked. These crashes are pretty damaging to getting anything done.)

[mikekaganski]

Having crash dumps and other debug information gathered and sent (and related bugs created!) could help. Of course, even more help could create using an own debug build, with a possibility to run it under debugger to catch the moment when something goes wrong. But that’s indeed very “intrusive” workflow

Base is very underdeveloped. If you want to contribute, you are most welcome!

[MSPhobe]

Please “upvote” this comment to “vote” “This happens to me too”? Or if you think I am just looking for karma points, add a comment, so the LO developers can know if it is a common problem?

[mikekaganski]

I’m one of the developers. And we know that this is a common problem. And no, I don’t “have” this problem (I don’t use Base). I just try to help you by an advise that I could give, given my lack of experience specifically with Base, but knowledge of the common situation and how things are done in the development and bugfixing.

[madMatti]

I was able to reduce the amount of problems by:

1. doing things in sequence (close a property window before switching to the next element, etc)
2. avoiding using different documents and elements at the same time
3. saving frequently (don’t forget to also use save in the main odb file)

The crashes conditioned me to navigate “by the book” or at least how I imagine the navigation was intended :D. Most of my crashes and bugs occur, when working with the GUI editor and doing a lot of stuff at once or for instance using a macro assignment in the events tab while editing a macro.

[kompilainenn]

Just don’t use Base. It’s the worst data base tool in the World. You can use other data base engines like MySQL, Postgress or SQLite and use Base only as UI and report builder for it.

[MSPhobe]

(^_^) There’s probably a lot of truth in what you say, @Kompilainenn! But I will cling to the idea that maybe I can survive the growing pains of Base+embedded Firebird long enough to get to where it is behaving better. I actually have a few MySQL databases, using LO as front end. But while they don’t misbehave the way Base does, I have other issues in that environment. But I’d encourage anyone to consider this very do-able alternative.

[MSPhobe]

Thank you, everyone! Main mission accomplished- thank you @mikekaganski for letting me know the right people know of the problem… whatever it is! (I do always let my system send the error report. If I can narrow down what causes the crashes, I’ll try to send more details.) (The “poll” I set up is, of course, now superfluous, but I didn’t have enough kama to delete that. If some system admin notices this, I won’t be offended if they delete that comment.)

Thank you @madMatti for some of the specifics of “being careful”. I was already using some of those precautions, and had a feeling they helped. I hadn’t thought of only having things like the property editor open “one at a time” and “briefly”… I’ll add that. And thank you madMatti and others for endorsing my hunch that it is usually only… if not always only… Base that brings things down. (I would add that I usually do okay using a base database. It is when I try to change a form or something like that that the crashes come.)