Dreamweaver Hangs, then loses all menus and toolbars

[kirkdickinson]

This happens to me several times a day when I am working in Dreamweaver. If I move the window when something else is going on, or if it takes too long to finish a search, or if for any reason, Dreamweaver turns grey and says "Not Responding", then if/when it comes back up, it strips off the menubar and toolbars and I have to close and reopen it to get them back.

This is obviously a bug making it change states like this, but is it changing to a state that is a "feature" that can be turned on or off with a keyboard command so that I can get back to my workspace without having to restart several times a day?

I currently have 2017.5 build 9878, but this has been happening through several builds for several months. Not completely discounting my older Windows 7 computer being the cause of this.

Running OK

After "Not Responding"

[Nancy OShea]

Looks like your HTML code contains errors as denoted by the Red X in both screenshots.  You might want to address that as a possible source of your problems.  The latest versions of DW are very fussy about code errors and if the errors are critical, DW will stop responding.

Nancy

[kirkdickinson]

This has nothing to do with the code. That is merely a list of 404's that I am tracking down. I get this error many times with many different documents.

[BenPleysier]

As we cannot see what the other different offending documents look like, I can only base my ideas on what I see. Could you please try to rename the document that you have shown by giving it a .txt extension and try to replicate the problem?

I think that Nancy is correct, Dreamweaver goes into a frenzy when there are coding errors and your document is far from being an HTML document.

[kirkdickinson]

Not discounting that offending code can cause problems. What I am saying is that this problem exists for me for any document or no document. It seems to break the interface when certain things happen. I can open DW fresh, open no document at all, use Find / Find and Replace In Files, and do a find and replace on an entire site. If I leave it completely alone for 4-5 minutes it will do everything just fine (usually). If I touch the window, move it, resize it, or anything, it will turn grey, report "Not Responding", and when it comes back, it will look like the second image I attached before.

I thought I got the entire process on a screen capture, but I have a very old version of Camstudio and I couldn't open the file.

I can try to get a screen capture to show you what is going on. If this was a Mac, I would trash my preferences and hope that would fix it.

[Nancy OShea]

When DW starts acting weird, the first thing to try is Deleting Corrupted Cache in DW

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/494811

If that doesn't help, try Restore Preferences

https://helpx.adobe.com/dreamweaver/kb/restore-preferences-dreamweaver-cs6-cc.html

If all else fails, use the CC Cleaner Tools below followed by a software re-install.

http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/cs5-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html

Nancy

[kirkdickinson]

I am working through those steps. Interestingly enough, the CTRL-Shift-WinKey and click on Dreamweaver does nothing. I had to delete the directory and registry keys manually.

Here is what it was doing before I attempted any of these steps.

DreamWeaver crash - YouTube

[kirkdickinson]

Step #1 and #2 changed nothing.

Got to step 3, I uninstalled Dreamweaver in the Control panel like it says to do, then restarted Windows, then ran the Adobe Cleaner. In the AdobeCleaner, there is no number option for Dreamweaver.

Going to go ahead and reinstall to see if that fixes it. Not having high hopes.

[kirkdickinson]

Well, that was a waste of a couple hours. It is still behaving exactly the same way.

[pziecina]

Are the files and assets you are working with on the same drive as your Dw instalation?

[kirkdickinson]

The files are on the same computer. Not the same drive. I have a Data drive that has all my photos and websites on it.

I am actually pretty old school and like to split up my drives by purpose. I have a 240GB SSD drive for OS, I have a 500 GB drive for programs, a 4TB drive for Photos/Documents/Websites and another 4TB drive for videos.

[Nancy OShea]

I keep all my sites and assets on the primary hard drive so I don't have latency or memory issues in DW.

My externals are used for backups and unused assets until such time as I bring them into the web site folder.  I think it's worth mentioning that CF developers  have moved to other IDEs because DW has no support for CF anymore.   The CF developers who wish  to keep using DW have dropped back to legacy CS6 (12.2).

Nancy

[kirkdickinson]

Nancy,

I really don't have a "Primary Drive". My SSD drive is my OS drive and the others are all internal. I have fast SATA drives and a lot of them.

Calling me a ColdFusion developer would be a huge stretch. I tinker with CF mostly to hook up data to pages. I don't need a lot of support for that. I could probably code what little I do in Notepad++ and in fact use it for some of the find and replace things that I cant seem to get to work right in the newer DW.

I like to use DW for quickly putting CSS and images onto pages and keeping things organized. I use the Put and Get a lot.

Since reloading DW, I have had several 3-4 minute "Failing To Respond" times, but haven't had the GUI on DW break again like before.

Time will tell.

Thanks.

[pziecina · Accepted solution]

Dw 2017 has problems when files are on different drives, freezing and hanging are typical symptoms of such a workflow.