Receiving SWF Compilation failed message in Adobe Captivate 2019 on Win 10 PC

[eelewis]

Having issues when trying to Preview or Publish a project using Adobe Captivate 2019 on Windows 10 PC.  Issue initially occured when tried to Publish a project as a Video that was created from a PowerPoint Slide Deck.  Reviewed Slides to ensure no automation was there, and still had issue; however co-worker that still has Win 7 was able to use the same set of slides & Publish to a Video w/o any issues.  As a test, I have even tried opening a Blanket Project, and even with No Data put in the project if I try to Preview from Slide or Publish I get the same error.  Adobe Captivate 2019 is already set-up to run Compatibility Mode for Win 8, and get the same issue.  Please advise whether there is anyway this can be resolved, so that I can successfully use this product.

[Lilybiri]

Which exact version, please? Look under Help, About Captivate to see the full version number.

Did you try to clean the Preferences? 

[eelewis]

The version of Adobe Captivate 2019 I'm running is 11.5.1.499.  I did try clearing my project cache, as well as running the 'CleanPreferencesWin.bat' file in the 'Utils' Adobe folder & still get the same results.  In addition, I've also tried uninstalling the program & then re-installing it.  Immediate after opening the program, after the re-install, I went to a Blank Project & tried to 'Preview From Slide' & still get the SWF compiliation failed message.

[Lilybiri]

If this is a non-responsive project, the only Preview method which doesn't need Flash Player is F11, Preview HTML in Browser. All the other preview methods use a temporary SWF file.

[eelewis]

What about on the Publish side.  I'm able to publish using the HTML5 option w/o any issues, but if I try to Publish using the 'Video' option I get the same error.  This is occuring even on a Blank Project, w/no data, that was opened directly in Captivate.

[Lilybiri]

Hmmm... have same version, no problem here.

You can try to delete the Content folder, and the Layouts folder from Public documents while Captivat is closed.

[eelewis]

Thank you for the suggestion, but I'm not sure I understand where the folders you reference would be located.  I checked under the Adobe Program File folder & didn't see any folders listed as 'Content' or 'Layout' listed.  Can you be more specific about where the folders you reference would be located?

[Lilybiri]

I rote 'in PUBLIC DOCUMENTS'. Not in the installation folder.   Or are you ob Mac, do not know where those copies are on a Mac.

[eelewis]

Ok, I found the folder you were referencing.  I am on a Win 10 PC, and the file path I had to follow to get to the folders you referenced was C:>Users>Public>Public Documents>Adobe>elearning Assets.  Within the 'eLearning Assets' I found the 'Content' & 'Layout' folder, which I deleted with Adobe Captivate closed.  However, immediately after opening Captivate to retry the Publish issue I've been having both of these folders were recreated by the system.  I tried once again to Open a 'Blank Project' in captivate & Publish it & received the same SWF error, so the deletion of those folders has not fixed the issue.

Someone else running the same version of Adobe, but on a Win 7 computer is able to Publish the same set of information without any issues, so there clearly appears to be something with Win 10 that is causing this issue.

[RodWard]

Are you running Captivate with full Administrator privileges?

Are your Default Folders (as listed in Edit > Preferences) pointing to local folders on your PC hard drive, or do they point to a network folder location?

[eelewis]

Success...It took quite a bit of playing around with the system, but I was able to finally get the Preview/Publish to Video optons to work.  With Win 10 it is very difficult to find a location that isn't networked, as even my Desktop is now sync'd thru OneDrive, but I was able to finally find a place w/in my Harddrive under my user folder where I could move both the Project Cache & Project folder to, and by editting the preferences as Rod indicated Captivate finally routed to the correct locations.  I had an issue that even after changing these settings that because of where I was trying to pull in a file from into Captivate, that these folders ended up getting recreated in the original OneDrive location, but I think I have finally got the program to stop doing that.  However, this is definately something for other users to watch out for, as it may work for a bit, but then the system may revert back to the original settings & need to be manually changed again. Given that Win 10 is the new standard operating system, and is meant to give users the ability to access their data from multiple devices, it would be nice if Adobe could update Captivate to work better with this platform.  For now, I'm just happy that items are publishing as expected.  For any others that have this issue, you should try this option 1st & it will probably save you a great deal of time.

[RodWard]

The ability for Windows 10 to allow you to access the same data or files from multiple devices or PCs relies on having all of your files located on a networked LAN server and that includes having your user profile kept on the server as well.  

While this is a great idea for things like Word documents or spreadsheets etc, it can cause a lot of problems for an app like Captivate which works somewhat differently.  When you are working on a Captiivate CPTX project file making changes, all of those changes are first being made on a copy of the file that exists in your Project Cache folder.  If that folder is also on the network, these tiny pieces of date being shuffled around can easily become corrupted.  The other problem is that NOT having all of this happening on your local PC hard drive will slow down performance in Captivate.

This is why for years now it has been recommended that you DO NOT work directly on project files that are held on a network drive but first download to a local hard drive folder and THEN open them with Captivate from there.  Backing up the file is the reverse of this procedure.  Close down from Captivate and THEN upload the newly-changed CPTX to the network folder using Windows Explorer.  I do this even with projects stored in OneDrive folders because 'the cloud' is really just a network as well.  You can have the same issues as a LAN.

Most company IT people know nothing about all this and just assume that Captivate should be installed with the same settings as other apps might have that use a roaming user profile.  But if you don't manually change your Default Folder locations in Preferences after Captivate is installed (and each time it is updated) and then adopt the recommended safe practices outlined above, you can end up with corrupted projects, slow performance, and lots of other annoying issues.