[Issue] OOo hangs with multiple soffice.exe in Task Manager

[John_Ha]

If I am using OO Writer, and I close all instances of OO, and I then quickly restart OO again, OO often hangs. (You know the sequence - you are editing something - you close it - and at that precise moment you remember you forgot something - so you immediately restart it.)

When it hangs, I start Task Manager and I always see multiple (sometimes 5 or 6) copies of soffice.exe and / or (s?)office.bin. The only way to get out of the hang is to use Task Manager to End Process with all these processes. I always use right click on one process > choose End Process Tree, and sometimes several of them disappear when I end just one as though they were part of a called tree. Once they are all gone OO is fine again.

Other factors which may be relevant are that I often seem to be opening an odt or doc or docx file still attached to an email (I use Thunderbird for emails) when it happens. I open such attachments by double left clicking on the attachment icon.

When I have closed all instances of OO, I invariable restart OO by clicking on the QuickLaunch icon in the Windows System Tray (the Quicklaunch icon runs soffice.exe). It only needs 1 click, but I usually forget and double click the Quicklaunch icon by mistake. The multiple instances in Task Manager may be because I double click on the Quicklaunch icon 2 or 3 times when OO doesn't start up.

When I do a standalone test (no OO instances running > double click quickly on the Quicklaunch icon), just one instance of OO starts OK.

I have a gut feeling, for which I have no evidence, that it happens when I have shut down the last instance of OO, and I then immediately start a new instance of OO before the previous instance has completed its shutdown.

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

OO 3.2.1 Build 9502, Windows 7 Home 64 bit, Intel dual 2.3GHz core, 4GB, Thunderbird

[RoryOF]

I suggest you count to about 20 before restarting OOo. Instead of clicking on Quickstarter, you could make a desktop icon for OOo.

[Hagar Delest]

There are indeed some problems from 3.2. See that query.

I fear there is nothing to be done except hope that 3.3 will do better.

[John_Ha]

Hagar

Thank you. Has a bug report been opened for this problem? If not, I am happy to open a bug.

[Hagar Delest]

Not that I know but since there is no simple way to reproduce it, devs may decline it. You can file one but I were you, I would wait for 3.3 and see if it still occurs.

[John_Ha]

Hagar

I checked and it has been reported as Bug 114963 in Oct 2010 - see http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=114963. I have added my comments.

[Hagar Delest]

Better vote for it so that it gets automatically confirmed by votes (3 or 4 votes IIRC).

[lewg]

This isn't limited to quick-sequential executions of one of the apps.

I often have a couple of spreadsheets open and one or two word processing files, all at once. OO seems to hang when there are two instances of both soffice.bin and soffice.exe in task manager. I have seen 4 instances of this pair, but the last time it hung there were only two.

I'll look for a way to vote. This is really not good for an app that wants to compete with ms.

[witkatz]

I had a similar problem. After copy and paste several cells in calc - the scalc.exe hang on shutdown. I could not open a new instance of calc and in the task manager I saw several instances of soffice.bin.

Then I disabled the "visual designs" in the properties of the soffice.exe and the problem seems solved.

regards
witkatz

Added on 11/18/2010:
Unfortunately, this workaround does not help when the cells contain formulas. So this point is still unsolved.

[audix]

Where is the option "visual designs" ??

[witkatz]

You have to right-click on soffice.exe stored in e.g. <C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenOffice.org 3\program>, and then go to Properties -> Compatibility -> Visual Designs. I hope it works.

regards, witkatz

[John_Ha]

Then I disabled the "visual designs" in the properties of the soffice.exe and the problem seems solved.

Be very careful doing this - when I tried it, it stopped File > Open from working, and I could not navigate anywhere to open any files!

The parameter is actually called Visual Themes and is changed by right-clicking on soffice.exe and choosing Properties -> Compatibility -> Visual THEMES. You tick the box to Disable Visual Themes.

MS says Disable visual themes "Disables themes on the program. Try this setting if you notice problems with the menus or buttons on the title bar of the program."

It is probably not surprising that the OO menu did not work once I had disabled them.

I am on Windows 7.

[witkatz]

Sorry. I meant of course "disable visual themes", on my german Vista it is called "Visuelle Designs deaktivieren". It worked for me for weeks, but now calc hangs sporadically again, when I copy and paste cells with formulas inside. Now I am trying another workaround, I set the compatibility mode to "Windows XP (Service Pack 2)" for the soffice.exe. It seems to be working fine for now and calc doesn't hang anymore, but I cannot test all features of the oo, an cannot assess the consequences this has.

regards, witkatz

[DuncanJMartin]

I seem to have found a work-around. I keep one OO document open at all times - a blank or dummy one is fine.

Then OO never shuts down, so never gets hung up.

[John_Ha]

This is a quick way to kill all the soffice.bin and soffice.exe processes using pskill.exe from PSTools

1 Download PSTools from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... s/bb896683
2 Extract pskill.exe and create a folder C:\Program Files (x86)\PSTools for it
3 Copy a shortcut on the desktop, and edit it by R-click > Properties. Make the Target: "C:\Program Files (x86)\PSTools\pskill.exe" -t soffice.bin and Start In: "C:\Program Files (x86)\PSTools"
4 Change the icon to something sensible, and call the shortcut something like ZapOOo

When in hangs, just click ZapOOo and it kills all the OpenOffice processes in TaskManager - the -t arguement means kill all.

Be careful you don't click it by mistake

Techie wizards will wrap the command in a trivial piece of code which asks "Are you sure?" first.

[Rottweiler]

Has anyone found a solution/workaround for this?

I have 2 systems running Win7/OO3.2 and both exhibit this problem. Seems about every 3rd time I run Calc it won't open (no splash screen or gui and have to kill soffice.bin to clear it). It is a fairly annoying problem.

[davelalande]

This is a quick way to kill all the soffice.bin and soffice.exe processes using pskill.exe from PSTools

1 Download PSTools from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... s/bb896683
2 Extract pskill.exe and create a folder C:\Program Files (x86)\PSTools for it
3 Copy a shortcut on the desktop, and edit it by R-click > Properties. Make the Target: "C:\Program Files (x86)\PSTools\pskill.exe" -t soffice.bin and Start In: "C:\Program Files (x86)\PSTools"
4 Change the icon to something sensible, and call the shortcut something like ZapOOo

When in hangs, just click ZapOOo and it kills all the OpenOffice processes in TaskManager - the -t arguement means kill all.

I was trying pskill and it doesn't work with the soffice.exe or .bin. I have never seen pskill not be able to kill a process.

I am launching remote presentations using soffice -show and doing it from a batch file. So in order to automate the job I have to shut down the process. I found I can kill the process using taskkill which I know comes with Windows 7. I am not sure about older versions of windows.

The command is...

taskkill /IM soffice.bin /F

/IM = image
/F = Force (this is a problem)

The problem with forcing the .bin to close is the next time you try to open the file, soffice goes into receovery mode on that file prompting you for recovery. I have cancelled out of recovery and the file opened fine, either way the file opened, but it took user intervention. For me this is not a workable solution, because I am trying to run presentations remotely using a batch (.cmd nowadays). But for others with this .bin issue, this might be a solution for the soffice.bin not shutting down.

Dave

[witkatz]

The issue seems to be solved with OO 3.3.
I tried to copy and paste cells and the discribed calc.exe shutdown problems didn't occur since I installed Open Office 3.3 on my Windows Vista 64.
witkatz

[Kirbett]

Was this problem supposed to be fixed in 3.3? I've encountered this problem twice now since installing OOo 3.3 on a new Windows 7 system about 2 weeks ago. As previously reported, happens sometimes (but not always) when I've had more than one OOo window open. QuickStarter disabled.

[Hagar Delest]

I don't see that anymore with 3.3.0. Try to reset your OOo user profile, especially if you have upgraded from a previous version.

[regli]

We have been using v3.4.1 without any issues but now with v4.0.9702 I'm seeing this happen with several users.

[Hagar Delest]

Have you tried to reset the profile? Don't transfer the personal data when asked for.

[regli]

Will try this if it crops up again. Thanks.

[icerabbit]

I know this old 3.2 3.3 problem is still present in 4.0.1 ... as I saw it today.

Shouldn't the closing of the main openoffice window kill off all its processes?

I have a retired family member who does some volunteer office work, and about once a month during an active day, towards the evening she can no longer open any office document whether received in email or saved to the hard drive. Today was one of those days. Not a single application open; but taskmanager reveals over three dozen orphan processes, not doing anything. Closing them all resolves the problem. Or a system restart.

This is light office use under window 8, light in technical nature, but maybe heavy in the number of small documents accessed throughout the day. Just basic creating and editing some letters & spreadsheets. Several documents open, edit, save, close openoffice. Check email. Receive another file that needs editing ... clickthrough via email, edit, save.

[breadran]

I am having the same problem. Just a minute ago I had to kill 8 hung OO sessions in the task manager before I could open a new file just received in an email. This is version 4.1.1 on Windows 8.1

[KenVista32]

Same problem here too. Version 4.1.1 on Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit, 3 gbs ram. Had to kill many OpenOffice processes before I could get OpenOffice to load again. Before I knew what was going on I had been repeatedly trying to open it under different conditions such as after closing down other programs running in background, running CCleaner, clearing font cache, and I even killed all the OO processes I could see that were together at the top of the process list. Nothing seemed to work. What I didnt realize was that there were other groups of OpenOffice processes much further down the list of processes that I had missed. Once I finally killed all of them I was able to open OOffice again.

[RoryOF]

Usually if you click on the title of a column it will sort the column content into order, which will have the effect of grouping all of a particular name together,

[John_Ha]

It happened to me again recently - the first time in many, many years.

I had gone File > Save As ..., or File > Open ..., or similar, and I had a window open with files visible. Instead of just completing the Save or Open, I started working with the files in the window. I am not sure exactly what I did - perhaps I deleted some file(s)? or renamed some file(s)? or I went New > Folder ..., and created a new folder (and renamed it?) and dragged a file(s) to the new folder? Whatever it was I did, Writer hanged with multiple instances in TaskManager.