RH8 crashing after opening project

Great news for Friday.

And you are more expert than you were!

Peter,
I worked in the project yesterday and I actually think I'm all set now.
Originally I thought that my fixes to the style sheet were not taking, because the style sheet was missing in the Topic List. But I believe that I am now just running into the bug from RH7 that you mentioned on 3/10. The style sheets are actually still applied according to the topic properties, but just are not showing in the Topic List.
I fixed all my other problems with the missing layouts/conditional text.
As for the illegal character messages that I was receiving initially, they are no longer appearing and were fixed when I reapplying the style sheet.

So not sure what happened originally. It appears that the illegal character messages are erroneous and really have to do with style sheets going missing from certain topic files for some unknown reason.

Anyway, I'm back in order now and greatly appreciate everyone's efforts!!!
This forum is great! I work alone and I'm NOT an expert, so now that I'm running into some RH8 "growing pains," it is nice to know that there is a group that I can turn to for advice.

-Deb

Indeed it is a long thread and longer as my memory obviously ;-)

It's a long thread. Long path name has already been ruled out.

Just pondering if this could be a long path name issue?

So for a month the filenames were OK and then they were illegal?

Only ten files are giving trouble, always the same ten.

Four went missing. Just from Project Manager or also could not be seen in Windows Explorer?

In a copy of the proejct have you tried deleting these ten topics and then doing some more work to see if the project then behaves?

Also in a copy, try deleting the CPD and see how it fares on reopening, or did we try that already.

Put together the whole story covering stuff like that and email me offline. The thread is messy and I would like to start over.

Don't send project yet.

Peter,
No, wrong case.
I upgraded from X5 to RH8 about a month ago and just started having problems recently.
All of a sudden, I started getting messages that my files had invalid characters and then the project crashes. Turns out that the style sheet goes missing from these 10 problem topic files. I think there were 4 files that just went completely missing and caused broken links--I have repaired this.
And as I mentioned earlier, my layouts and conditional text were wiped out. My next move, is to try to get those restored next using the instructions on your Web site.

So, I have 3 versions of this project:
1) before upgrading to RH8 (file is about 1 month old)
2) errors still showing & project crashing
3) Some repairs made, can open the project and use it, but style sheets will not "stay" assigned on the 10 problem files, although I am no longer getting the illegal character messages.

-Deb

It's too late here to read through all this again. Is it the case that this went wrong from the minute you upgraded to RH8?

If it is, then I would like to try the upgrade here.

Zip up the X5 version of the project and send it via http://www.transferbigfiles.com. I will upgrade it soon after receipt to see what happens but any further work will take longer. I have someone else ahead of you in the queue!

Email me via my site to say that you have uploaded the file to that site and include a link to this thread.

Well, I have a copy of the project showing the errors and then after that it crashes. That is 93MB zipped.

And, I have the copy that I have been working on. This one is not using my normal HTML layout, which was wiped out and I have yet to replace (other stuff has been wiped out as well, see comment of 3/10). It's default layout is WebHelp now, which I don't use. (I was getting ready to try fixing that per Opening Projects on your Web site, but was busy interviewing today.) The size of this project is 95MB zipped. The project opens without the messages cropping up BUT I just checked out the topic list and see that all the topics that had problems yesterday (and I thought were fixed) no longer have the default.css assigned to them. So I apparently still have problems, which are just not being reported. PS this project also had about 6 broken links yesterday, because for some unknown reason files that had resided in the project just disappeared. Really. Like they are missing from the folder. Do not exist. (Where did they go? Who knows???) Since the missing topics haven't been updated for quite some time, I just imported them back into the project from a downlevel version that I had laying around.

I also have a copy of the same project before I upgraded from X5 to RH8. Copied all my projects to a file before I started.

What a mess....
-Deb

I now have RH8 up and running.

How big is the project zipped up?