Project Does Not Respond

[Skystride01]

Good Day. I am using RH9 and my large projects started to freeze up and not respond. I suspect file corruption. I have reinstalled RH9 to no avail. Any suggestions? Thanks.

Additional information: Project opens and sometimes works for a short period before freezing.

[Peter Grainge]

Is there any source control involved?

Where are the projects stored?

Do you have the same problem with the sample projects? Click Open on the RoboHelp Starter page and then click Samples in the ribbon on the left.

What version of Windows?

Have IT changed anything? Particularly the virus checker.

Take a look at Opening Projects on my site. Maybe the CPD file needs to be deleted.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Skystride01]

Hi Peter. No, there is no source control involved. The project is stored on my local C: drive where the program resides. I am not having the problem with the sample projects and I have been able to create a new test project and generate output successfully. I am using Win 7 and since it is my personal desktop computer, IT has not changed anything. I did delete the CPD file and rebuild it but the problem remains.

I did download a trial version of Captivate 8 to test it to see if I wanted to upgrade from v5.5. I mention that only as a change to my system. And I did check for RH9 updates and downloaded and installed 9.02.

I did system maintenance, emptied the files marked for deletion, ran virus checker and WinZip Registry cleaner.

I do not import Word documents and I write everything directly in RH.

The two projects I am having problems with are more than 10 years old and have come up through the versions. They are very large with more than 4,000 htm files each. I have had this happen on occasion before. The problem has mysteriously gone away on its own in the past. It is persisting this time.

Thanks for your help.

[Peter Grainge]

There is no specific limit to the number of topics, it's about the combination of topics and images. With Rh9 I found 4,000 topics without many images was around the level where performance did drop off but not to the level you describe. Maybe you have lots of images as well and that is behind the problem?

How powerful is the machine itself?

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Skystride01]

Peter, There are 3,964 topics, 8810 local links and hundreds of jpg files. The CHM file is 30 MB is size.

I am using a HP 64-bit operating system with 6GB RAM and using an AMD 3800 processor.

The project is a HTML Manual for our company's accounting product.

I appreciate any insight you may have. Thanks.

[Peter Grainge]

Create a copy of the project and just blindly delete half the topics. Does it then start to play nicely?

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Skystride01]

I did as you suggested and deleted half of the topics. It still hangs up after I open the project and select a topic.

[Peter Grainge]

It seems to be time for the old divide and conquer approach.

Zip up the project so you have a copy that cannot accidentally be opened and worked on. That gives you a copy that you can safely revert to later if needed. Save the zip file somewhere safe.

Then create another copy of the project so that you have two copies that can be worked on.

Open Copy 1 and delete half the topics. Ignore any broken links reported. Generate the help from that copy.

Open Copy 2 and delete the other half of the topics. Generate the help from that copy.

It should be the case that one copy is now OK and one still has the problem.

Trash the good copy and then create a second copy of the copy with the problem.

Repeat the process until you have located the topic that is causing the problem.

The process takes less time than you might think.

****************************************

Not sure what to suggest if that fails but let's worry about that when we get there.

---

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[Skystride01]

Thanks Peter, I will give that process a try.

[Skystride01]

I believe I found the problem.

Apparently, when a topic (htm file) is renamed using Topic Properties, thereafter it causes a processing error when it is used in a hyperlink.

By deleting the topic with both RH in the project and Win Explorer in the directory, then re-entering it in the project from scratch, the RH not responding problem goes away.

[Captiv8r]

Renaming a topic should always ever be done using the RoboHelp interface. Doing it that way ensures the project database as well as any links are updated to reflect the new name.

Deleting a topic from the RoboHelp interface also should delete it from Windows Explorer.

The bottom line here is that you should never really consider mixing using Windows Explorer as well as RoboHelp to manage deleting, moving or renaming topics. If you have been working that way, there's your reason for RoboHelp stalling!

Cheers... Rick

[Skystride01]

You are correct Rick. I used RH to rename the topic. However, I found out that while RH renamed the topic in the project, it did not rename the topic at the directory level and that was where the issue lay. It occurred due to the way I renamed which was to use Topic Properties vs a right click on the topic list.

Any way, now that I know the problem I quickly found the same issue in a second project and was able to correct it.