FrameMaker 9 stopped opening .fm files -- help?

[Seanb_us]

Windows XP, 2GB RAM, plenty HDD space, FM 9 all patched up.

Last Thursday, and before, all was well. FM 9 opened all my fm files great (all are FM 9 files created with the version of FM in question).

Friday, FrameMaker 9 stopped displaying FM files. Book files display okay. But, all .fm files, including those that previously displayed well, do not display. Instead, the work area displays all white. Now, here's the strange part, if I provoke a FrameMaker dialog box, by closing an open fm file (that is not displaying correctly), the file does display correctly behind the dialog box. If I cancel the dialog box, the file (by which, I mean the contents of the current .fm page) is all white again. This problem afflicts all fm files.

I have a concurrent (legal) installation of FM8. FrameMaker 8 is working fine.

I am using Windows XP (32-bit) SP 3. I installed nothing around  Thursday and Friday and, as far as I can tell, Microsoft and Adobe did not, either.

I tried rolling back to a restore point from a week earlier. The roll back worked but the FM 9 problem remained.

I uninstalled Technical Communication Suite 2 and reinstalled FM+Acrobat+Captivate+Photoshop. That uninstallation took an ungodly 3 hours, but the process did not fix the problem. .fm files still display as blank white until an FM dialog box is provoked, and then the page displays under the dialog box.

I tried uninstalling my video driver and just using the default Windows one (at 640x480, this stinks). But still FM 9 has the issue with fm files.

Finally, I tried FM 9 in safe mode, but the Adobe licensing software prevented me from running this test.

So, help! Any advice on what's going on with FM9 and how to fix it? At this time I am at a loss to get FM 9 working on this computer--and it worked here before last Friday.

Thanks,

Sean

[Russ Ward]

Sean,

I have seen this happen, but the problem did not persist through an FM restart. I don't know what the answer is, but I thought I'd at least let you know that it has been seen before.

Russ

[AxialInfo]

I've seen display corruptions in FM9 that sound similar, and in my case I think they're memory-related. The effect that you describe is the same, the FM window opens blank white, and if/when the chapter does open, the icons and task bars are transparent, so I can see the desktop behind them, but the icons and menus do actually work if I put my cursor where they should be appearing.

In my case this is when working on huge files (by huge, I mean 1000+ pages filled with tables, approx 1million table cells total). This system is WinXP / SP2, 4gb RAM

[Arnis Gubins]

Sean,

It's (white screen) also been reported (and I get it too) when creating CYK PDFs. This is just temporary while the PDF is being produced, but something at the FM end is definitely triggering.

It sounds like lucky you has hit the magic combo that triggers the white screen for normal operations.

Do you have any Framescripts that run at start up or event scripts lying in wait? Have you disabled all third-party plug-ins?

[Seanb_us]

Thanks all.

These are small files, from opening the stock portrait template to opening an .fm that's maybe 50 pages.

I have nothing else running. The PC has 2GB RAM and a 3GHz Intel CPU.

Any advice to get FrameMaker working on this PC again?

Thanks,

Sean

[Van Kurtz]

If you notice that when the screen goes white, the window border looks like a standard Windows window frame (that is, with blue borders), not the standard FrameMaker window frame/desktop.

This is my "theory"...

Because FrameMaker code is very old, it does not call  the operating system as often as new applications do , such as Illustrator. When it is doing a time-consuming process, at some point the Windows operating system is told to draw the window frame, which it does by creating the standard frame filled with white. When Frame is finished with its long process, it then has a chance to draw its own version of the window frame; thus, the white screen with blue border disappears and the standard FrameMaker desktop/window frame displays. It is a temporary thing, but eventually goes away if one waits long enough...at least that is my experience.

Some one in an earlier post mentioned that it appears to be resource related. I recently upgraded my computer to more memory, and the white screen appears much less often, which seems to agree with the idea that it is related to available resources.

[Seanb_us]

So ... let's say you have a PC on the corporate network. And, your antivirus solution is dispensed from a central location on that network. And, the network resource changes and your PC cannot find it, but now is always looking for that network resource.

Under such extraordinary circumstances, do you think Windows having such network issues might get in the way of FrameMaker 9 (but not FrameMaker 8) drawing its windows correctly?

Thoughts?

Sean

[AxialInfo]

Maybe you could try "de-podding" the FM workspace, which makes FM use much lower amount of memory when opening files. I'll try to dig up a link resource for the way to do this, I think it was posted on one of the FM tech blogs not too long ago.

edit: here's a start: http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2009/05/workspaces_in_fm9.html

[Seanb_us]

Thanks all!

My solution was to rip out the hard drive, buy and install a new hard drive, install the OS all the applications and all the patches.

It worked like a charm. FrameMaker 9 is again functional.

I wish I know why it broke though, so I could provider some helpful hints about prevention.

Cheers,

Sean