[Asmithey]

With Maxwell Render as the only program installed on the virtual machine, I have been opening, editing and saving materials for about 15 min and have not had one freeze or crash of either MXED or windows explorer.

[Asmithey]

Update.

On the VM I installed Maxwell Render. No windows updates. Every thing runs great. SO I went and did one round of windows updates with Maxwell only installed. Runs Great. So I did a second round of windows updates...And BOOM! MXED and Explorer start crashing.

[JDHill]

Hmm, I usually have pretty strong skepticism regarding claims of software issues being due to OS updates. And, I have to keep my own machines up to date, and am not seeing any such issue here, and neither is the vast majority of Maxwell 3 users. So I have a hard time believing this would actually be the cause (can't rule it out, since Windows may update itself differently on different machines), and would want to know exactly what was included (OS updates, driver updates, etc) in that second round of updates.

[Asmithey]

I t was a fresh windows install. I did not manually load any drivers the machine asked for me to update the video driver but I did not do it. The only thing knowingly updated was windows. Did you see in my other posts that my other win 7 machines are doing the same crashes as well? I have confirmed this. Nextlimit is free to remote into my machine for testing. I can set up another fresh VM too. The only option I have is to uninstall the Maxwell Shell. And that Is not good.

[JDHill]

Please email me (jeremy at nextlimit dot com), and let's see what we can do.

[Asmithey]

Sweet....

[Asmithey]

Jeremy,

Sorry we have not connected about this issue yet. I have just been so busy. But I wanted to let you know that I am still experiencing this issue on all my computers. I am running Windows 7. I thought once I jumped to v3.1.0 maybe it would go away but it did not. Does Nextlimt have any computers running Windows 7 that they can test on, with all current Windows updates.. Can Nextlimit get MXED to crash windows when saving materials.

[JDHill]

There are people here who use Win 7 (I use 8.1, but it shouldn't make a difference), running Maxwell all day debugging issues, running tests, making materials for marketing, etc, and I'm not aware of any of them being able to observe anything such problem. What I find to be more likely, though it shouldn't be the case given the description of what you've done, is that there would be some particular file involved, which triggers an unknown and esoteric bug in MXED or the SDK, whereby the reading of this file causes one or both of them to corrupt some memory. Meaning, there would be some MXM file that uses an uncommon combination of features (there have been other cases in the past, where a file has, say, some text in the description field, and also has had an MXM reference path set, but not enabled, and so forth), which is being read by the two applications, and triggering the fault. But you say that all you did was install the OS, Maxwell, and OS updates, and were then able to observe it, so that shouldn't be the case, since you'd have all the same files as anyone else.

[Asmithey]

I reported this issue on the Blender Artists forum on the B-Maxwell thread. Nikolaev Ildar, the creator of B-Maxwell, ran some tests on a Win 7 system and was able to reproduce the explorer crash.

Here is what he said.

Hi,

"Yes, I'm using Windows 7 to discover the problem. Seem it's exist only in win7, probably in "Vista" too."

"Other things that I'm discovered. The Explorer show thumbnails in different panes: the Files, Preview and Details. For each pane the Explorer requests a thumbnail from the handler (maxwell.shell.dll) but do it simultaneous. The maxwell.shell.dll can't to open same file more than one time in one moment and it crashes the Explorer."

He also writes....

"When you select a file, the Explorer requests thumbnail for each enabled view pane, but doing it simultaneous and therefore there is a situation when the handler is not fully read thumbnail from the file and it again requested for the thumbnail from the same file. In my extension I used so called mutex to synchronize requests. Here is more info about mutex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_exclusion . My English is not so good to explain it myself."

"While solving this problem I'm write own thumbnail handler for mxm files. I can send it to you If you wish."

He wrote this mxm handler and I now do not experience any crashes. Here is a link to the mxm handler..... https://yadi.sk/d/Uahzrmj_gSMUx

Aaron

[JDHill]

Thanks, the detail about having multiple thumbnails requested at the same time is the key. I find that there is some problem with a compression library used in Maxwell, which may indeed be able to be worked around by serializing file access.

[numerobis]

Thank you very much Aaron!!! It works. No more crashes... i can't believe it - finally for the first time in v3 after more than a year!

And of course a big thank you to Nikolaev Ildar!!!


...maybe he can fix the mxi-crash problem too? Or maybe it is based on the same problems and fixed also now... i have to test it.

[Asmithey]

Cool. Glad it is working for you too. I will let N. Ildar know over on the Blender artists forum that you said thanks.

Aaron