Numerous invalid broken links

[DebWriter]

Hello!
I recently have upgraded to RH8 and have been using it with a few problems nothing serious.
All of a sudden today, I'm opening my projects and almost all of my topics are in the Broken Links folder in Project Manager.
I hardly ever get a broken link, so I'm not too familiar with them. I ran the broken links report and RH appears to think that these 200+ topics are missing. They appear to be fake broken links.
If I right-click a topic in the Broken Links folder and select Restore, the topic is removed from the Broken Links folder and put back in the HTML Files folder. So that seems to be fixing them, but I'm not really sure what the problem is or if I'm really fixing them.
Most of the references seem to just be TOC and indexes; a few have references.
I read about a few other problems in the forum having to do with broken links but the problems don't seem to be the same as my problem.
Can anybody tell me what may be going wrong?
Am I fixing these properly or is there an easier way to do this?
Does RH put topics in the Broken Links folder when those topics are missing OR are those the topics that contain broken links? That's not clear to me either.

Thanks! I'd appreciate any insight or help anyone could provide to me.
-Deb

[Peter Grainge]

You are getting this in more than one project, all or some?

Have you tried opening one of the sample projects? Same?

All projects local and no source control involved?

I have seen this after renaming a project but not otherwise. There I simply right clicked and selected Restore. After that I had no more broken link problems so I think you will be OK.

Please back up at least one of the projects before you repair it in case it is needed for investigation. I don't think anyone else has reported this issue.

What you see in the list is the topic that is missing. If you right click and select Edit, the topic with the link to the missing topic will be shown so that you could remove the link if that was the objective, which in your case it is not.

[DebWriter]

Hi Peter,
Another of my projects is crashing after opening and before I even do anything. But the project manager was open and the Broken Links folder was empty. So don't know if this is related, maybe RH files became corrupt?
(I just posted an entry in the forum about that one about 5-10 minutes ago.)

I've successfully opened another of my projects earlier today and didn't see any problems. That project was under SourceSafe source control.

The project with the broken links is not under source control.

Anyway, where can I find the sample projects? I'll try to open one and see what happens. Did not see them in the Starter.

Thx! -Deb

[DebWriter]

Just opened another project that I had in SourceSafe and it's working fine. No broken links.
Anyway, I did put a copy of the project on our network late Fri afternoon after I was finished working on it. So there is a copy saved and everything was working fine Fri afternoon.

Well, now my small problem with the 200+ broken links pales in comparison to my project that is crashing after opening it.
So I'm going to provide more info to the forum entry now.....

-Deb

[DebWriter]

Hello,
Well, it wasn't fun, but I went down the list of over 200+ fake broken links and restored them last night, re-compiled the project and everything appears to be back in order.
I just hope that it doesn't happen again. The missing topics that RH was complaining about were never moved from their original locations, so I believe that the broken links were invalid to begin with.
Anyway, so far so good. I'm putting this one to bed.
Thanks!
-Deb

[Peter Grainge]

OK but do let us know if you have further issues. Sorry I could not help more.

[RoboWizard]

Hi Deb

By chance was this project upgraded to version 8 from an older version? I ask because I think there may be a bit of a bugbear in 8 where it doesn't immediately show Broken links. Last week I conducted a RoboHelp class where the participants were using version 8 but we were all using the version 7 training material. Part of the class involves troubleshooting a broken link that has always been present in the material. The thing was, it didn't show for the version 8 users. (Showed in my version 7 just dandy!)

Just some pondering out loud... Rick

[DebWriter]

Hello Rick,
Yes, this project was upgraded from X5 to RH8.
But I don't think the broken links were found as a result of working in RH8 because I've been working in this project using RH8 for a few weeks now. So if RH8 is catching the broken links then they should have shown up a few weeks ago.
There were also over 200 broken links.
Just to double-check, I went into an earlier chm file from last month and checked out a couple of the broken links that were complained about and they were not broken.
I really think I ran into a bug of some sort.
-Deb

[MergeThis]

Have your IT peeps been messing with new/updated anti-virus software, or setting up "virtual networks"?

As hundreds of previous forum topics would attest to, either would be prime candidates for corrupting a RoboHelp project.


Good luck,
Leon

[DebWriter]

Hello Leon,
Well, we have a lot of that going on here, but I am running my projects locally on my desktop computer in my office, so hopefully I am beyond their reach.
I do take copies of my projects that are not in SourceSafe and copy them to the network to save them. But I was working from the local copy. I never try to run RH from the network.

Curiously, I have received a new message yesterday and today telling me that I have an old virus definition file. I haven't done anything with it yet. thought that it meant that I needed to download an update to the virus software.
I hate to turn off the virus software because I do have to go on the Internet for information, etc. Is running virus software locally a problem with RH?

Thx. -Deb

[RoboColum_n_]

The anti virus s/w shouldn't affect RH one little bit so I shouldn't turn that off.