* V4 Upgrade Crashes - Help Please

[PaulDesmondWhite]

Several weeks ago i downloaded the trial V4 to 'upgrade' V3. As you'll note from my subsequent posts, i wasn't very happy about property box behaviour and focus changes after switching applications.

These shortcomings were important enough to me to cast doubt on the wisdom of upgrading and i hesitated for a while - during which the trial expired.

Needing quick access to my data, i uninstalled V4, then reinstalled V3 and the maintenance upgrade. To my intense annoyance, V3 misbehaved in a number of areas on account of modifications to the GED made by V4. As i'd updated the GED with V4 without the ability to retain V3 compatibility i could not revert to an earlier V3 backup.

Reluctantly (frankly, with bad grace) i coughed up the twenty quid, got the new licence key, reinstalled V3 (again, to be sure), downloaded the V4 upgrade for 3.x and installed that.

Right at the outset V4 crashed when i tried to switch from the wonderful new 'focus' view to the records window, and has done so at least 10 times during the last hour in a wide variety of situations.

The program is obviously in bad shape because many menu and toolbar items are unavailable, for instance all the standard diagram options from the records window. It is completely unusable and i'm desperate to get on with some real work.

My system runs XP Pro SP3, fully updated, and is otherwise extremely well-behaved.

The only doubts in my mind are (a) the reversion to V3, (b) the choice of upgrade program and (c) using CCleaner registry clean-up before upgrading to V4.

Please get me out of this appalling mess.

Paul


ID:4216

[Jane]

I have not heard of anyone else having repeatable crashes with Family Historian 4 certainly not with the numbers which you are suggesting.

In order to track down the cause can you try a few things.

1. Turn of any Spyware or Virus Checkers. Obviously you may want to unplug your internet for the testing period.

2. Log the exact details of the crash messages from the More Details Tab.

3. Run the GEDCOM Validate routine from the File menu over your file.

4. Try running the upgrade again over your installation (I think it will allow it) after re-downloading the upgrade file.

[PaulDesmondWhite]

Paul White said:
Please get me out of this appalling mess.

Well i tried Jane's suggestions, sadly without result, so got down to checking out all the running processes.

To cut a really long and boring story short, my laptop graphics card is by SiS Corporation and one of the utilities is called keyhook.exe. This intercepts normal keyboard handling so as to add support for non-standard keys such as might be found on multimedia keyboards, etc.

As an aside, many anti-malware programs will flag such processes as suspicious because their behaviour is similar to key loggers.

I had no need of keyhook.exe, so removed it from the startup list and everything is working perfectly now.

Some matters arising:

• There is still a mystery why this startup program was present at all, because the latest driver and utility download from SiS Corp seems not to install it for XP systems like mine. I was going to take this up with SiS, but life's too short.
• Why is FH4 so vulnerable to something like this? You'll see from an earlier post of mine that i've got serious reservations about the V4 interface that in several ways is inferior to that of V3. Given the support for my stance from a couple of experienced quarters, i'm quite disappointed there's no sign of recognition for this complaint.
• Valerie Horler's post today on Diagram menu corruptions is uncannily like the symptoms i experienced - is there something similar going on here?

[Jane]

Thanks for posting the solution. I am glad you managed to track down the culprit.

It's possible that the 'keyhook' you had may not have been fully compatible with XP, and the security on FH conflicted in some way, although I am only guessing.