Robohelp 10 crashing when generating a CHM

[asloan]

I am running Robohelp 10.0.1.292 on a Windows 7 64-bit with 4GB of RAM. I have a Robohelp project with 1,969 topics from which I've successfully built three WebHelp outputs, but when I generate a CHM file using the same conditional tags as one of the WebHelp outputs, Robohelp consistently crashes on the same topic and produces two crash events in my Windows Event log:

Event #1

RoboHTML.exe

   10.0.1.292

   51493787

   mfc100u.dll

   10.0.40219.325

   4df2e0e6

   c0000005

   0005cb9b

   f64

   01cfa2a229b521c5

   C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 10\RoboHTML\RoboHTML.exe

   C:\Windows\system32\mfc100u.dll

   e6b660f9-0e95-11e4-b500-001d0935163c

Event #2

RoboHTML.exe

   10.0.1.292

   51493787

   ntdll.dll

   6.1.7601.18247

   521ea8e7

   c0150010

   0008482b

   f64

   01cfa2a229b521c5

   C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe RoboHelp 10\RoboHTML\RoboHTML.exe

   C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll

   ea2dc420-0e95-11e4-b500-001d0935163c

I rebooted my PC and restarted Robohelp, then applied a conditional tag to exclude the topic from the build and was able to successfully generate the CHM file. I turned off the conditional and have tried the following strategies which all result in the same two sequential Robohelp crashes:

• Delete the CPD file
• Delete topic from project and recreate it
• Delete all the links to and from this topic
• Remove topic from the TOC
• Turn off conditional expressions
• Delete the browse sequence
• Delete the index
• Change the path of the CHM file to one that is outside of the project
• Shorten the output path of the CHM file to not have any spaces

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Alan

[Captiv8r]

Are you able to copy and paste all the HTML code from the offending topic into a reply here?

If so, I'd be happy to test it in my own RoboHelp and see if it crashes on me.

Cheers... Rick

[Captiv8r]

Another thought occurs here. What exactly is the topic file name? Maybe that has something to do with it.

[asloan]

The file name of the topic is About_Testing_Formulas.htm.

[asloan]

Unfortunately it is proprietary content for a product version that hasn't been released yet, so I don't think my company would allow that. I also tried removing all the content from the offending topic and just putting in a Heading 1 tag with no other content. The result was the same pair of crashes.

[asloan]

I have also copied the project over to another PC that has more RAM (8 GB vs 4), and had the same crashing outcome from RoboHelp.

[Captiv8r · Accepted solution]

That doesn't surprise me. What seems odd is that you say the crash still occurs if you remove all content from the topic. That would certainly seem to imply that something is possibly fishy with the file name.

I'd be tempted to try a slight variation on the file name and see if that works. Also try a variation on the Topic Title.

Cheers... Rick

[asloan]

Thank you! I changed the name of both the topic title and file name. Now the compilation process continues until it hit another file and crashed the same way. I'll try that same method and see where it gets me.

[asloan]

Thanks, Rick! Interesting thing is that I was only able to resolve the issue by changing both the Topic Title and file name at the same time. When I changed one or the other, the CHM generation failed. When I changed both, it worked.