Download Studio repeatedly crashing

[Chris Gorringe]

I am using DS 9.0.3.0 and I have had the occasional crash which I have sent through to your support email. This morning I have a scenario where it crashes every time. As a precaution, I have deleted my local profile's Appdata\Conceiva folder and the local user registry key for Conceiva and reset my settings back to default but the problem still persists.

If I attempt to download Microsoft's SQL 2014 Feature Pack and allow DS to show the stack of dialogs, it gets to nearly the end and then crashes. The URL is this: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=42295

I am using Win 8.0 x64 Enterprise with IE 10.

Is this problem already resolved in a beta release?

Thanks
Chris

[Peter]

Hi Chris,
thanks for reporting this, we reproduced the crash and it appears that the webpage is triggering each file as a separate download which causes a stack overflow when too many dialogs are displayed. You can work around this by going to Tools->Options->Downloading->Download Wizard and change the setting for 'Web browser click monitoring & Windows clipboard monitoring' to 'Use silent downloading' and this will add the jobs without showing the Add job dialog.

[Chris Gorringe]

Hi Chris,
thanks for reporting this, we reproduced the crash and it appears that the webpage is triggering each file as a separate download which causes a stack overflow when too many dialogs are displayed. You can work around this by going to Tools->Options->Downloading->Download Wizard and change the setting for 'Web browser click monitoring & Windows clipboard monitoring' to 'Use silent downloading' and this will add the jobs without showing the Add job dialog.

Hi Peter

Thank you for this information. This then leads to more questions... When I download files of this nature, I have to place them in a structured storage location on our network so I have to set the target location each time. If I set DS to use silent downloading, I would then have to go into each entry and set the location at that point. As the location is generated depending on the page title (I cut and paste info from the page into the target location), I would have to go back to the page to find the correct text to put into the location. As I don't know when DS is going to crash, I cannot sensibly pre-empt when to turn on or turn off silent downloading i.e. I don't think this is a workable solution for me. If I accept that it is a bug and what is causing it, I can work around it. However, are you intending to increase the apps stack space in the next release to solve the problem? And if so, when would this be available to test etc.?

As an aside, I am a developer and I have been considering the possible ways of automating the process of setting the target path based on specific page information (specifically MS downloads etc.). Are there any interfaces and/or hook points into DS whereby I could "drive" DS programmatically? I currently use AutoIT (C# with DLL) to automate some of the process but it is clunky and not very elegant. :)

[Paul]

We'll look into the problem and fix it so that the crash does not occur. Email us at support [at] conceiva [dot] com so we can provide a patch when it is ready.