[GNC] GNU crashes when any Report is selected

Arnie Reeves karndale at blueyonder.co.uk
Mon Dec 10 09:24:46 EST 2018


Thank you Stan for your interesting comments regarding the effects of MS Windows 10/Office updates. I will hold these in mind as I dig deeper.
Best Regards
Arnie


-----Original Message-----
From: Stan Brown <the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm> 
Sent: 10 December 2018 12:47
To: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Cc: Arnie Reeves <karndale at blueyonder.co.uk>; David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: GNU crashes when any Report is selected

Hi, Arnie.

> Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2018 16:27:01 -0000
> From: "Arnie Reeves" <karndale at blueyonder.co.uk>
> To: "'David Carlson'" <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
> 
> Thank you for your response David, suggesting ?other? program updates on 
> my Windows 10 set up, including a recent upgrade to MS Office 2019 which 
> includes Access, may be responsible for causing my GNUCash 2.6.19 to 
> crash every time I select a report. That being the only suggestion (so 
> far), I believe my only option is to reinstall the GNUCash program, and 
> keep fingers crossed. 

You sound perhaps a bit skeptical of David's blaming your troubles on Windows 10 updates, so I thought I'd offer my perspective. Based on my experience at work (I do customer support for a company that sells application software to run in Windows), I have no trouble at all believing that David has put his finger on it.

We are seeing a LOT of cases where our software is working on Windows 10 computers, Windows or Office or both do an automatic update, and our software stops working. We spend weeks trying to troubleshoot some of these, and often we're unable to fix them because the cause is that Microsoft's own updates have broken a piece of its Windows or Office software.  GnuCash is fortunate in not being directly dependent on Excel, but Office updates update Windows code and vice versa, so either type of update can cause a problem in Windows or Office or both.

The pace of these "updatogenic" problems is accelerating in a frightening way. A time may come when it's simply impossible to keep application programs working in Windows 10, or at least where you can expect to spend more time finding help with problems caused by Microsoft updates than you do actually using your software.

One thing you can do to reduce your exposure is to make sure you're not in "Windows Insider", "Office Insider" or any other "Insider". Those update schedules get you updates that Microsoft doesn't even pretend to have tested adequately. Some problems are caught at that stage, so that the monthly updates are less buggy than they would be otherwise. Not that the monthly updates are bug free by any means, but they're usually not as bad as the Insider builds.

-- 
Stan Brown
the_stan_brown at fastmail.fm
https://BrownMath.com
http://OakRoadSystems.com/



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