Igor freezing when opened for certain experiments

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Mon, 09/07/2015 - 08:10 am

I've been having very strange behaviour where Igor freezes and refuses to open certain older experiments. It doesn't happen for new ones (e.g. earlier today) but for ones a few months old.

I suspected it was my "#include" statements, but I'm used the same statements in the good/bad experiments.

Somehow I've already solved this by the what-did-I-do-last method, but I thought I'd post for the sake of others: it turns out having a shortcut in my Igor procedures folder which pointed to my data folder caused the problem. I haven't figured out why yet. Possibly a link to a network drive, or just the very large number of data in my data folder.

Hope this helps someone.
In case the freezing is defrosted after 10 seconds (and you are running WIN), it is a map to a network drive. There is a 10'000 ms time out defined somewhere in the registry. Maybe your old experiments can still be opened if you wait long enough.
(10 secs without a progress bar are horribly long these days...)
HJ

September 15, 2015 at 02:17 am - Permalink

It's possible that the experiments that take a long time to load (appear to freeze) have symbolic paths pointing to network locations that are no longer available. If the OS can not resolve find the network location and the symbolic path is needed to access a file, Igor will ask you to locate the folder. If the symbolic path is not needed to access a file, Igor will not ask you to locate the folder, but it will still attempt to resolve the symbolic path when the experiment is loaded.

There are network timeouts at various levels on Windows. I have found no clear explanation but this web page covers some of the territory: http://superuser.com/questions/453741/how-to-set-the-windows-network-ti…

September 15, 2015 at 05:21 pm - Permalink