User Tool Update Hangs

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

This started out as a technical support note, but while trying to track down as many details as possible to report my problem, I found a fix. My fix makes me think my problem was a bug, so here goes:

 

On Tuesday, Accordance started hanging up every time I try to update a particular User Tool. I had added maybe a dozen lines of text; no Scripture links and everything was in English. After the first or second hang, when I pulled the User tool up, the text was there, although the last line or two was right justified instead of left justified. Today the new text I added was lost when the program hung up.

 

When I click "update" in the edit window, I get the standard little box telling me that it is updating, and the aqua status bar, but the bar quickly stops moving and I get the spinning beach ball. Checking either the Accordance icon in the dock or the Activity Monitor tells me that Accordance is not responding. The Activity monitor also indicates that Accordance is using between 83 and 90% of the CPU capacity during a hang.

 

Other User Tools updated without a problem.

 

The problematic User Tool is titled "Year B Notes." I remembered that I had seen files in the ~/Documents/Accordance/User Tools files named ".Year B Notes" "..Year B Notes" and so on. When I looked back, I found other files starting with one or more periods and followed by the names of other user tools. Presumably these are created during the updating process? I noticed that at the top of the list there were files whose names were composed of all periods, because there was no more room for the letters of the file name. When I removed all the files whose name started with one or more periods, I was able to update my User Tool without a hitch. A quick check of the folder in question shows that there is now a new file there titled "..Year B Notes"

 

Other than clearing out the ".." files periodically, is there a fix for this issue?

 

Also, is it safe for me to throw out the ".." files I removed from my Accordance folder?

[Helen Brown]

These are temporary files created during the process of updating a user notes or user tools file. They are normally deleted at the end of the update, but if Accordance crashed during an update, the file may be left behind.

 

It is certainly safe to manually delete them (except during an update). We will look into a method of automatically removing them if they do happen to be left in the folder.

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

Hmm.. I'm pretty sure some of those files have been sitting in my folder since I upgraded to Accordance 7, and I haven't had that many crashes. Updating is working fine for me now, with no more crashes, but I notice that I now have three of those ".." files in my User Tools folder--all for the same tool I've been updating successfully this morning, and all have appeared since the crashes stopped. There must be a glitch in the deleting of the files on my machine. Not a big deal, since I know how to fix it.

[Lorinda H. M. Hoover]

Just a quick note to let you know that this is happening again for me. The good news is that it had been so long since I have had a user note update hang that I had forgotten what the cause was. It was only after I pulled my preferences to the desktop and reopened Accordance that I caught it. I had to add the problematic user tool module back to my list, and when I went to do so I saw all those ..... files again. Deleting them all fixed the problem.

 

The user tool in question is one that I created only a couple of weeks ago, and have been updating very frequently. I know for a fact that I have not had any Accordance crashes since I created the tool--until I had to force quit today. My guess is that the bug has never disappeared, but that I hadn't updated a user tool frequently enough to get to a file name of all periods until today.

 

 

I'm running Accordance 7.1 on an iBook G4, system 10.4.8. (I have Norton Antivirus running--could that be related?)