Framemaker 9 glitching forces me to restart frequently and interrupts my workflow

[Guest]

I've been running into this problem off and on for a while. I've seen this across multiple laptops, Windows XP and Windows 7. I don't use FrameMaker in structured mode. Basically, I will be working on files in framemaker 9 from anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or two and suddenly the text I am working on will glitch and usually change to a weird or distorted looking font and then when I scroll the page at all, all the text on the page glitches and the row that was at the edge of the screen will just repeat over and over as I scroll. I then have to quit. The save dialogs and any warning messages that come up don't actually display, but I can still save and/or hit escape to close out the dialogs and close the program. Then, once I reopen framemaker and the file I was working on, it will look normal and frame will behave for as long as it feels like until it decides to stop working again. I've tried multiple times using the "repair installation" option in the install dvd. I have no idea what the problem is as there doesn't seem to be any particular thing I do to cause this. I'm not sure of this is a problem with my frame installation, if my .fm files are corrupted, or what the problem is but at the moment I dont' seem to be getting more than 5-10 minutes of stability before I have to restart. Has anyone encountered something like this before? Any help anyone could give me would be greatly appreciated.

Edmund

[Bob_Niland]

> ... and suddenly the text I am working on will glitch and usually change to ...

What happens when you do a screen refresh (Control+L)?

> ... dont' seem to be getting more than 5-10 minutes of stability ...

What are your screen-saver and power management settings?

What is your FM auto-save setting?

Are the document files local or networked?

The usual suspect for what you describe is a graphics driver bug, but not if it's happening on multiple disparate platforms.

[Guest]

Sorry it's taken me so long to respond, here are my answers to your questions:

> ... and suddenly the text I am working on will glitch and usually change to ...

What happens when you do a screen refresh (Control+L)?

--Nothing happens

> ... dont' seem to be getting more than 5-10 minutes of stability ...

What are your screen-saver and power management settings?

--Plugged in (which is how I am using it)

dim the display: 5 minutes

turn off the display: 10 minutes

Put the computer to sleep: never

I don't have a screen saver on

What is your FM auto-save setting?

---I don't have Automatic Save enabled, just the automatic backup on save option

Are the document files local or networked?

---The document files are local.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Are you all patched up in FM9? I seem to remember that there were at least 2 patches issued - you need to load them sequentially because they aren't cumulative.

[Guest]

I believe there were 4 patches (or at least I have readme files for patches 1-4 in my installation directory.) I installed them using adobe updater so I'm assuming they were sequential. I'm running Version 9.0p255

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

That seems to be up to date - I think I remember someone having something similar occur a couple of years ago that had something to do with some program that was loaded on their machine - but I can't remember what it was or what they were advised to do by Adobe Support. Personally, I would be moving up to FM11 because there are a bunch of fixes & improvements made since FM9. Why not try out a trial copy on a non-production machine to see if you get any relief?

[walter_koerner]

This description of FrameMaker's behaviour reminds me of the GDI-Leak.

FrameMaker 8, FrameMaker 9, FrameMaker 10 and FrameMaker 11 allocate GDI-objects from the Operating system (like other programs) but the FrameMaker programs do not release all of them after use.

The number of GDI-objects assigned to a process is limited by the operating system. The default limit is 10000 for Win XP and Windows 7.

If FrameMaker reaches this limit it stopps working correctly, especially the display becomes awful, finally it crashes.

You can check whether my assumption is right, if you observe the number of GDI-objects allocated by FrameMaker.

To do so open the Task Manager and include the column "GDI-Objects" in the process list.

Do your work in FrameMaker and look at the Task Manager to see the number of GDI-objects used by FrameMaker.

[Mike Wickham]

Tried it out of curiosity, but could find no way to add a column to the

process list in Task Manager (Windows 7).

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

@Mike – try View > Options > Select Columns ?

[Mike Wickham]

Well, son of a gun. View> Options> Select Columns is there now, but I

swear it was missing from the menu when I looked earlier. It was either

a glitch or bad eyesight.