User Timeout Problems

[Dealec]

Ok this is a bit of a strange yet very annoying problem.

We had out User Timeout set to 45 mins, but on a hand full of machines in the office, instead of shutting down Actinic it would look as if nothing had happened.

UNTIL you tried to use it, then it would produce an error message and crash out.

This didn't cause too much of a problem as we would just re-load Actinic and try again, until we updated to the latest v8 release. Now if this takes place during an order download, the order is lost, resulting in us having to find the confirmation email from the lost order and contact the customer to gather missing information.

I've changed the Timeout length to the maximum 1440 mins, but this doesn't offer us a huge amount of security (and makes the function pretty pointless).

Has anyone else come accross this problem?? I'm fairly sure it's not the machine set up its self as all the machines in the office are identical HP Machines with identical software installed on them

Thanks
Andy

[TraceyG]

Hi Andrew,

I can't find that this issue has been reported to us before. I take it that this is the Multi-User software?

but on a hand full of machines in the office, instead of shutting down Actinic it would look as if nothing had happened.

How many users do you have and how many pcs are affected in this way?

until we updated to the latest v8 release. Now if this takes place during an order download, the order is lost,

Are the orders being downloaded via the machine that 'crashes' or do you mean that when another pc crashes it causes problems with the orders?
Can you confirm that if a pc crashed during a download before you upgraded, that the orders weren't lost?
What version did you upgrade from?

[Dealec]

I guess i should have made those things a bit clearer

Ok we're using Version 8 multiuser, and currently 8 or 9 out of the 10 machine running it prefer to crash rather than shutdown after the timeout period.

we have 1 main Administrator user who downloads and prints all the orders (due to a previous problem), all the other users are standard order processors.

All the machines are the same HP units, setup from the same XP restart discs.

Also the machines that crash have always done it from the first install of Actinic, so it doesn't look like it's caused by something we installed at a later date.

[TraceyG]

Hi,

Does the software ever crash when you close the software normally?

Can you answer these questions specifically please:

Can you confirm that if a pc crashed during a download before you upgraded, that the orders weren't lost?
What version did you upgrade from?

[Dealec]

No, when close manually actinic doesn't crash.

[Dealec]

in the previous version (8.0.2) when the system crashed during download the orders would remain on our web server for us to collect after restart.

[TraceyG]

Thanks Andrew,

I was just wondering if something had changed in the software that now causes the orders to be deleted, so I'll pass this information onto our development team to see if they can shed any light on the matter. By the way, can you see if any dump files (*.dmp) have been created in your installation folder (on any machine that sees this crashing problem). If so can you email me the latest one so we can see if there is anything there that helps point to the problem.

[TraceyG]

Hi Andrew,

Our developers have said that there have been no changes in the area of downloading so we're not sure why the orders are being deleted since you upgraded. We'd need a snapshot to see if we can recreate this and the user timeout crash too. Could you upload a snapshot somewhere and email me a link to download it from (please bear in mind that as it is a bank holiday I won't now be working until Tuesday - so don't upload anything until after the bank holiday).