Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

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ark
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Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by ark » Sun Apr 28, 2013 2:07 pm

I'm running Live 9 32-bit on Windows 7 64-bit. Since getting Live 9, I have often found that operations such as scanning the User Library, which should take seconds or minutes, wind up taking days or weeks. Similarly, from time to time Live's window would freeze, and the measure counter would stop moving, only to start up again the moment I tried to shut it down.

Finally, I was able to reproduce the following bizarre phenomenon: Once Live has done anything that causes it to reate a dialog box, such as loading or saving a Live Set, Live's window stops updating unless the mouse cursor is within the window boundaries AND IS MOVING.

Not only that, but I found what is causing it. I am using an NVIDIA graphics card, and it's supporting software includes something called nVIew Desktop Manager. This software is intended to make it easier to use multiple monotones by, for example, letting you choose which monotir will be used for dialog,boxes me,pop-ups.

It turns out that this program is incompatible with Live. Telling it "Please do not mess with Live's window at all" made all the problems go away. Live seems much more resposnsive overall, too.

It is entirely possible that other video cards come with similar programs. The point of this message is to suggest that if Live is hanging in ways that are hard to understand or explain, you might check whether your machine has such software.
Last edited by ark on Mon Apr 29, 2013 10:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

CarlSeleborg
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Re: Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by CarlSeleborg » Mon Apr 29, 2013 8:48 am

Hi ark,

Thanks for sharing your findings, this is good info.

Best,

Carl

re:dream
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Re: Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by re:dream » Mon Apr 29, 2013 9:47 am

Tell the folks at Abes. They might find this useful info.

mr.ergonomics
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Re: Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by mr.ergonomics » Mon Apr 29, 2013 11:19 am

Thanks for the Info Finn and Thanks for the acknowledgement Carl!

darkenedsoul
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Re: Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by darkenedsoul » Mon Apr 29, 2013 2:15 pm

Can't we just uninstall the nView Desktop Manager via Control Panel? If that's the case I'll be looking into this on my DAW desktop to see if that could be causing the sluggishness I am seeing. Running 9.0.2 32 bit on Win7 64 Bit Home Premium 4GB mem, 3.0Ghz C2D E6850, XFX 8800GTS 640MB nVidia graphics card (yeah it's old but it is not prime gaming rig ;-) ).
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ark
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Re: Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by ark » Mon Apr 29, 2013 10:30 pm

darkenedsoul wrote:Can't we just uninstall the nView Desktop Manager via Control Panel?
Sure, but that wasn't necessary in order to avoid the problem, and you might want to use it with other applications.

H20nly
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Re: Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by H20nly » Mon Apr 29, 2013 10:44 pm

nice sleuthing ark!

ark
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Re: Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by ark » Wed May 01, 2013 10:54 pm

A little more information: I reported this problem to NVIDIA. They were able to reproduce it on their machine, and have reported that it occurs only with release 311.50 of their device driver, which was released on April 7, 2013. In particular, it does not occur on version 311.35, which was released on March 8, 2013, and which you can find here.

H20nly
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Re: Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by H20nly » Thu May 02, 2013 9:07 pm

bump.

agent314
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Re: Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by agent314 » Thu May 02, 2013 9:17 pm

This is awesome. Great detective work.

ark
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Re: Mystery hang under Windows 7--SOLVED!

Post by ark » Thu May 02, 2013 9:26 pm

Thanks!

Incidentally, NVIDIA just told me that the bug has been identified and fixed internally; the fix will be either in the next version they release or the one after that.

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