SOffice.bin issue in 2.3.1

[meninblack]

When a user opens a document, OpenOffice just sits there. When you check there are multiple soffice.exe and soffice.bin entries in the Task Manager.

When you terminate them and try opening the document again it's fine.

This has only started happening since we moved to version 2.3.1.

Any idea's

Thanks
Kris

[Bill]

It's an old bug going back to at least version 1.0.1 which hasn't been fixed yet. Although all the bug reports I found are for Windows systems, I see the same problem on both Windows ME and Xubuntu 7.10.

Cannot shutdown windows properly...

[Hagar Delest]

But the strange thing is that it was working fine before.

Have you tried to rename the OOo user profile so that a new one is created (\Documents and settings\<user>\Application data\OpenOffice.org2)?

[meninblack]

We were using 2.0.2 before and never had this problem.

I have set up a couple test environments to see if I can get somewhere.

Thanks for any advice given.

Kris

[Hagar Delest]

NB: you can try with the 2.4 release now.

Did the renaming of OOo user profile change anything?

[SkyBeam]

Hi,

Unfortunately this problem seems to be back in latest 3.2.1 version.
In fact there is an easy way to reproduce the problem. At least I've tried this on Windows:

- Open Windows Epxlorer
- Go to a folder which contains multiple OpenOffice documents
- Select at least two of them
- Select File => Print (or select print from the context menu)

Then you will notice that only the first document is printed. All subsequent documents are not ending up in the print queue at all. Opening up the task manager will reveal multiple soffice.exe and soffice.bin processes running. Somehow they seem to be in blocked state.
While these processes are running it is not possible to open any OpenOffice.org application instance. The processes will appear in task manager but no window will appear until you force all processes to close (or logoff/reboot...).

This seems to me like some race condition. Probably related to the locking mechanism used to detect multiple instances. It only happens if multiple instances are launched in parallel (like the shell-print command does).

On a Windows XP SP3 x86 machine it's always fully reproducible.

This issue is related to the one found here: http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/ ... 15&t=28564

There it is suggested to create a SendTo link to print multiple files. However this does not solve the problem entirely. SendTo links get all documents selected as arguments. The maximum number of arguments which can be passed is 20 so if you need to print more than 20 documents at once it's PITA since you have to print in multiple chunks.