Captivate 7 Crashing

[Greig_at_Lands]

Hi,

I have recently installed Captivate 7 and am having some crashing issues.

I converted an old project to Captivate 7 and was able to open it, edit it, save it and close it. I then tried to create a blank project and Captivate crashes. Captivate puts a template slide in the blank project for me which looks like a PowerPoint slide with instructions to "Double click to add title". Being new to Captivate 7 I have tried to do this only to end up with the following error messages:

"A fatal error has occurred and the application is being terminated. Adobe Captivate has tried to save all your work in the respective project folders as ".cpbackup" files.

Please restart Adobe Captivate."

A randomly named backup file also appears (the randomness coming from the fact that I have not saved the new blank project I guess, although I did try a save and got the same issues with crashing).

As the blank project is still opened I have tried to go back and double-click to add a title only to be told:

"Placeholder_1 is either a reserved keyword or is already assigned to another item. Provide a different name for the item."

This is a bit odd as it is Captivate doing the naming, not me. I suspect that it might be in conflit with the cpbackup file?

Anyway, has anyway got any ideas before I blast it all away (not an easy option as I have to get ICT support to do this as I am not allowed to be an administrator on my machine) and reinstall or get my money back and go to an earlier version of Captivate that I know works?

Any help or suggestion is appreciated. I have tried renaming the resource folder in Application Data\Adobe but this did not seem to work.

Thanks for your time,

Greig

[nsukumar]

Hi there,

Are you able to insert objects on the newly created project? Is this Crash happens only when you try to convert the placeholder?

Can you please try deleting the preferences by using the 'CleanPreferencesWin' and see it resolves the issue?

  Close Captivate if it is running

1. 1. Double click on the 'CleanPreferencesWin' file from the 'Installation folder\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 6 x64\utils'.
2. 2. Re- launch Captivate, Create a blank project, try to convert the placeholder and verify

Thanks,

Nimmy Sukumaran.

[Greig_at_Lands]

Hi Nimmy,

Thanks for the reply.

I am not able to insert objects on the newly created project. Captivate 7 crashes when i try to do so.

I tried running the CleanPreferencesWin on both Captivate 6 and Captivate 7 with no luck.

Greig

[RodWard]

You mentioned that you are not an Administrator for this machine and that you may need to get IT people involved to perform tasks.

Since it appears you are on a corporate network, this makes me ask the following:

• Has IT set up Captivate for you so that it is launched with Run As Administrator privileges? 
• Is this network re-routing your My Documents folder on a LAN server somewhere instead of on your local hard drive? 
• Are they using Roaming Profiles in your IT environment? 

If the answer to these questions may determine whether or not you can get Cp7 to work properly on your PC.

[Greig_at_Lands]

Thanks for the replies. I am still working through them but I am just going to throw another error message into the mix. After clicking OK to the message about the reserved name (second red line in my first posting) I received the following error:

"The exception unkown software exception (0x40000015) occurred in the application at location 0x78b2d6fd.

Click on OK to terminate the program"

Greig

[Greig_at_Lands]

My wonderful IT helper set up Admin rights for me on all of the Adobe folders under Program Files but crashing still occurs.

[RodWard]

Are you now able to right click on the Adobe Captivate icon and select Run As Administrator?  If so, that's one thing down.

The other reasons Captivate usually crashes on launch are:

• Corrupted fonts - You'll need to remove all fonts except those that were loaded originally with Windows and, if that fixes the issue with Cp, then try adding the fonts back a few at a time until you find the corrupted ones.
• Your IT environment uses Roaming Profiles or virtual My Documents folders.  This can also cause issues.  Check your Preferences > General > Default Locations to see if these point to locations on your hard drive or somewhere on a network LAN.

[Sivakumar_Nagarajan]

Hi Greig

It is never a good idea to continue working on the Captivate app instance *after* you get a Fatal error and app requests you to restart it. The subsequent error messages "placeholder_1 ..." may not make much sense as the app is already in limbo.

Having said that, please make sure you are doing the following (even if looks like repeating a step that you have already done in the past).

1. Shutdown Captivate if it is already running.

2. Clear the preferences by running the tool Nimmy has mentioned earlier. Typically the preferences folder will be at C:\users\<user_name>\AppData\Local\Adobe\Captivate 7.0 folder. Make sure that the preferences are actually getting deleted by checking before and after running the tool. You may also remove the preferences folder manually if the tool fails for some reason.

3. Clear all contents of captivate cache folder. Typically cache folder will be at C:\users\<user_name>\Documents\Adobe Captivate Cached Projects

4. Launch Captivate as Administrator. You have to explicitly right-click, choose "Run as administrator". By default, Windows will run any app in non-admin mode, even if the user has admin rights.

5. *Do not open* the older captivate project that will trigger an upgrade to Captivate version 7.

6. Create a blank new project. Repeat the steps that caused a crash previously and check if the problem persists.

7. If there is no problem, then, try opening the older Captivate project (don't open the project if it is on a network drive; copy it locally and then open) and let upgrade happen.

8. Try opening a blank project after that and see if the crash reappears.

Please let us know what happened.

Cheers

Siva

[FrogSlug]

Thanks for the suggestions Siva. I was having a similar problem as Greig at Lands. Anytime I tried to edit a text box in Captivate 7, I received the fatal error message.

I tried launching Captivate as an Administrator by right-clicking and choosing "Run as Administrator", as  suggested, and that fixed the problem for me. As Siva mentioned, even if you are an administrator, it will default to non-admin mode, so it's worth trying.

[Greig_at_Lands]

Yes, running the programme as an administrator does overcome the problem.

Unfortunately for me this is not an option as I am not allowed to do this on my work computer.

Many thanks to everyone for their suggestions and to Adobe who are still looking in to the matter for me in the hope that we can get over this problem.

I will point out that I was able to install Captivate 7 on another computer that has no history of Captivate and it seems to work fine, without the need to resort to running as an administrator.

[rdm]

Hi There,

I have got the same error message every time I try to record my screen.

A fatal error has occurred and the application is being terminated. Adobe Captivate has tried to save all your work in the respective project folders as ".cpbackup" files.

Also, I am not able to open a blank project. Captivate won't open it.

I run as administrator but it doens't seem to change anything. Do you think it depends on some of my settings on the computer?

Please adivise.

Thanks

[nsukumar]

Hi rdm,

May I know your Captivate version and platform? Can you please try deleting the preferences, create a blank project and see it resolves the issue or not. To delete  preferences, run "CleanPreferencesWin" file from the Captivate <Installation dir>utils folder.

If it still crashes we would like to have a connect session with you and resolves the issue. I will send you a seperate mail regarding the same

Thanks,

Nimmy Sukumaran.

[rdm]

Just solved this problem with Adobe.

The problem seemed to be the themes folder location, which was corrupting Captivate.

Therefore, we created a new theme location on the C drive and we put this location in the Adobe Captivate Configuration Settings (see below)

UserPathForLayoutsAndInteractions = "C:\Captivate_Themes"

Hope I didn't miss anithing important...It was 1.5 hours of conversation on Skype.

Thanks,

Raffaele

[Greig_at_Lands]

Just an update on the issue I initially flagged. Siva at Adobe is being very helpful but the problem is proving to be difficult to pin down due to a number of factors most of which are out of Abobe's control. I have been able to succesfully install Captivate 7 on another machine and have it work okay, even without being an administrator on that machine. I will update this thread when I know more. Siva is currently looking at some code for me.

Greig