Captivate 9 Crashes On F8 Preview

[mce22380392]

I'm usually good at troubleshooting, but the situation I'm encountering is driving me bananas!

When I press the F8 key, it's a 50-50 proposition as to whether or not Captivate will crash. At the point that it does, the dialog states: "writing file tags to stream." The dialog box shows consistently 30% when this occurs before receiving the crash message: "a fatal error has occurred..."

Based on articles that I've read, I've tried the following:

• Changing the executable properties to "run as administrator."
• Copying slides from one file to a fresh, new file.

While I've also tried rebuilding from scratch, at some point corruption enters in, but I can't seem to determine where it's coming from. Can anyone provide help?

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Update: I just created a NEW FILE using the blank template. I inserted blank slides 1 by one to create a 3 slide presentation. I then added a rectangle to the 2nd slide and ran the preview. No crash. I then duplicated the slides and reran the preview. The program then crashed.

[RodWard]

An F8 preview is only previewing from the current slide to the end of the project.

Are you still able to successfully preview or publish the entire project using the other preview options?

Have you tried resetting Preferences yet?

[mce22380392]

Hi Rod,

Thank you for your quick response. Can you tell me how to reset preferences? I am not able to find my preferences folder. I am looking in:

C:\Users\mmcevoy\AppData\Local\Adobe\Captivate 9.0

We are a Windows 7 shop. Additionally, I do have Windows set to show hidden folders and files.

Captivate also crashes periodically when attempting to publish the file. And I recently discovered that it may not publish all slides, even if the publish routine appears to have been successful.

Mark

[RodWard]

You will need Administrator privileges to your PC.

Close down Captivate first.

Go to the Adobe Captivate 9 install directory in Program Files.  Look for the Utils directory, and in there you will find a file called CleanPreferencesWin.bat

Double-click that file to execute the clear the preference settings.  The next time you launch Captivate it will set up a whole new Preference profile.  However, the default settings are often not ideal and you may need to reset some things the way you originally had them.  Check the recommendations in this article:

http://www.infosemantics.com.au/adobe-captivate-troubleshooting/how-to-set-up-preferences

[mce22380392]

Hi Rod,

Just a quick update. I need to get a Help Desk second-level support team member to run the batch file because end-users at the company I work for do not typically have administrator rights. Although I'm able to change the "run as administrator" flag within the Properties dialog, I'm not trusting that running the batch file is having any affect. At least that's what I'm hoping since there has been no change in Captivate's behavior after I ran the batch file myself.

My Help Desk has indicated to me a 24 hour turnaround on my call. I'll post next once I hear back from second-level support.

Regards,

Mark

[Lilybiri]

When killing the Preferences you can loose some customisation. I tried to summarize what is lost, and how you can recover some:

Captivate 8.0.1 Install? Keep your Customisation! - Captivate blog