On 02/03/15 19:06, David Scriven wrote:

Dear All, I'm using GIMP (2.8.14, downloaded from your site) on two Windows 7 x64 machines (both fully up-to-date). Both have antivirus software and Office 2010 with Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc. installed and active. On numerous occasions and while GIMP is being used Windows issues the message "GIMP has encountered a problem and must close". This usually occurs when one or more Office 2010 windows are also open. For example, a colleague working on machine (#1, 4 cores, 8 GB memory, HD Intel graphics) found that bringing an open Excel window into focus to enter data obtained from GIMP was sufficient to crash GIMP and cause this message. (this is consistent and has happened many times). This has only just started occurring - previously the user on machine 1 had used GIMP for the same task without problem (update to Office causing the problem??). I have now encountered the problem on machine #2 (16 cores, 64GB memory, high-end NVIDIA card) using GIMP and Powerpoint simultaneously, although I have not been able to identify a precipitating event that causes this.

I have tried increasing the memory available to GIMP in both machines (via Edit/Preferences) but to no avail. The error message is virtually meaningless. The crashes are frequent enough (about 1 /hour) that is extremely irritating, never mind the loss of time and work. Any ideas? David

What do you mean by
"bringing an open Excel window into focus to enter data obtained from GIMP"? How are you trying to transfer the data (presumably an image) from GIMP to Excel?

It sounds like you are not doing anything with GIMP leading up to the crash. i.e. it has been sitting idle for some time. Is that correct?

How much swap space (paging file size) does the system have? Is it set to fixed limits, or to "Let Windows Manage My Virtual Memory"? How much free disk space is there?

It sounds like you are bumping up against some system resource limit, but which one is hard to tell. Is there anything in the system error log?

Gary

Hi Dave,

What do you mean by "bringing an open Excel window into focus to enter data obtained from GIMP"?

You clarified in step 3 below.

We are using GIMP to calculate some values and then manually entering the data in Excel. Steps:
1. Excel is active
2. GIMP is active - make measurements and note them down 3 Click on the Excel window so that it gets focus- i.e. it comes to the front so that you can enter data
4. Message pops up "GIMP has encountered a problem and must close"

So GIMP has not been idle, nor is it on the other machine when it crashes The machines have a lot of free disk space - 3 Terabytes on Machine #1, about 1 Terabyte on Machine #2 Memory is managed by Windows

Wow, that is really bizarre.
What is the file type of the image being viewed? Does it still crash if you use an image of a different type? Is the image being edited located on the system on which gimp is executing, or is it located on a shared file system on a different machine? If you go to edit/preferences/folders, what are the temporary folder and the swap folder values, and are those located on the same machine on which gimp is executing?
What happens if you do the measurement and instead of clicking on another application, just wait a minute or two? Can you perform another operation in gimp under those conditions without it crashing? For example, measure something else in the same image?

If you run the taskmgr and view the performance tab, does anything grow like crazy and saturate at a high value when it's in the process of crashing, then go back down to more normal values? If it does, can you tell which process (probably gimp, but you never know...) is consuming the resource?

The error log on machine #2 shows the following: Faulting application name: gimp-2.8.exe, version: 2.8.14.0, time stamp: 0x00000000 Faulting module name: libcairo-2.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0xa340a328 Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00000000000235b4
Faulting process id: 0x1344
Faulting application start time: 0x01d03e91dbe5d19d Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\GIMP 2\bin\gimp-2.8.exe Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\GIMP 2\bin\libcairo-2.dll Report Id: df6c9434-ab43-11e4-8279-002590c1ee4d

I'm fishing with the above questions to try to figure out why it would be crashing in the cairo library; it's hard to imagine why it would crash there when gimp loses focus, although I don't know squat about cairo or the ways gimp uses it.

Do you happen to have a version of the program cairo-trace on your system? If so, it may be helpful to start gimp using the command cairo-trace gimp
cairo-trace creates a file that shows all the operations cairo is performing; it may be possible to see what it is doing when it fails by examining that file.

Gary

On 02/03/15 19:06, David Scriven wrote:

Dear All, I'm using GIMP (2.8.14, downloaded from your site) on two Windows 7 x64 machines (both fully up-to-date). Both have antivirus software and Office 2010 with Word, Powerpoint, Excel, etc. installed and active. On numerous occasions and while GIMP is being used Windows issues the message "GIMP has encountered a problem and must close". This usually occurs when one or more Office 2010 windows are also open. For example, a colleague working on machine (#1, 4 cores, 8 GB memory, HD Intel graphics) found that bringing an open Excel window into focus to enter data obtained from GIMP was sufficient to crash GIMP and cause this message. (this is consistent and has happened many times). This has only just started occurring - previously the user on machine 1 had used GIMP for the same task without problem (update to Office causing the problem??). I have now encountered the problem on machine #2 (16 cores, 64GB memory, high-end NVIDIA card) using GIMP and Powerpoint simultaneously, although I have not been able to identify a precipitating event that causes this.

I have tried increasing the memory available to GIMP in both machines (via Edit/Preferences) but to no avail. The error message is virtually meaningless. The crashes are frequent enough (about 1 /hour) that is extremely irritating, never mind the loss of time and work. Any ideas? David

What do you mean by

"bringing an open Excel window into focus to enter data obtained from GIMP"?

How are you trying to transfer the data (presumably an image) from GIMP to Excel?

It sounds like you are not doing anything with GIMP leading up to the crash. i.e. it has been sitting idle for some time. Is that correct?

How much swap space (paging file size) does the system have? Is it set to fixed limits, or to "Let Windows Manage My Virtual Memory"? How much free disk space is there?

It sounds like you are bumping up against some system resource limit, but which one is hard to tell. Is there anything in the system error log?

Gary