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Affinity Designer crashing because program files scattered on E drive.


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Hi all.

 

I am having problems with Affinity Designer crashing when:

I try to create a new category, rename a category, add objects to a category or a subcategory.

There are probably multiple reasons why this is happening, but I think the main one is this.

 

I have two drives on my computer C and E.

C drive 194 gb capacity

E drive 931 gb capacity

 

Windows and most of the important program files are stored on C drive.

When I purchased and installed Affinity Designer I decided to install it on E drive because I thought it would save space on C drive also I thought it might run faster on E drive because it has a lot more space.

 

When I chose to install it I created a folder named Affinity Designer and tried to install AD in that folder. But what happened was that AD installed in separate files which mixed up with all my other files on E drive. It is a mess I can tell you.

I don’t know how to collect all the AD files and combine them into one file because I don’t know what files belong to AD. I have opened some of the files and they clearly list AD in the file names. But I installed other programs on E drive and the same happened to them and it is such a mess.

There are two solutions I can think of.

1.     First, I export all the assets, styles, brushes etc that I have made or bought into a file so I have a copy of them. I reinstall AD and let it delete all the other files. (This time installing on C drive so it doesn’t stuff up again). Then reinstall all my files again and see if AD runs properly.

2.     Ask if someone can give me an image of all the files associated with AD so I can search, gather and collect them from E drive and place them into the original folder I made.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions or know how to help?

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Yip that wasn't a good installment idea, since the Affinity apps aren't so called portable Win app versions, meaning those apps who can here be instead installed in an freely choosable independent drive/directory manner from the usual drive C related Win programs folder.

Your best move might be (in case you get it somehow opened and running again from drive E) to export and backup all the stuff you explicitly internally added to it (brushes, assets, styles etc.), as far as you don't have backup copies of those add-on files. Then use the Win/apps uninstaller and uninstall the whole (the Installer part usually keeps a track of what has been where installed, meaning it holds a list and knows where file portions of the release app have been placed to during the installation. That's what the Uninstaller then usually accesses when removing/deinstalling again).

Afterwards install it newly/freshly the usual default way on your drive C, so it appears there under the Win programs. Then you can reimport all those things you have added additionally/manually. - Note that working files etc., so those which you created with AD, can be still left on drive E, those shouldn't be affected since they don't belong to the initial release app. Thus you have to differentiate between those and the AD apps own release files (for the later the Uninstaller should normally automatically know).

 

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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Thanks V_kyr, for responding. I will do as you suggest and reinstall on C drive. I've learned my lesson.

I wish the computer manufacturer had created more space on C drive or not split the drives at all. They also created a D drive with the Levono installation files and no extra space.  It is the weirdest setup I've had on a computer.

 

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There are reasons a system can be configured in such a way. If it's a Desktop PC I suspect it has 2 Hard drives, a Solid State Disk (SSD) to get quick boot speeds and fast program reactions and either a standard SATA or a Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (SSD/HDD) for storage.

When Windows installs a program there are multiple locations it will add files to. It will also add registry entries (don't go there unless you know what you are doing :ph34r:)  Like V_kyr has said let the uninstaller do the work because it will remove registry entries as well. Anything created after install will likely stay on Drive E: because the uninstaller will not know about those files.

Just because something says it's associated with Affinity does not necessarily mean it's of affinity so be careful what you delete. If need be check here first.

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions

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7 hours ago, v_kyr said:

since the Affinity apps aren't so called portable Win app versions, meaning those apps who can here be instead installed in an freely choosable independent drive/directory manner from the usual drive C related Win programs folder.

That's not my understanding of portable - that would be an app that can be installed on a removable drive and run on different PCs.  I can't think of any reason why AD must be installed on the system disk, but if that's the case there shouldn't be an option to do something different.

43 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

I suspect it has 2 Hard drives, a Solid State Disk (SSD) to get quick boot speeds and fast program reactions and either a standard SATA or a Hybrid Hard Disk Drive (SSD/HDD) for storage.

My first thought was  that there's just one physical drive that's been partitioned.  If that's the case the partition sizes can be changed.

1 hour ago, Bibi McMurray said:

They also created a D drive with the Levono installation files and no extra space.  It is the weirdest setup I've had on a computer.

That's common practice with the big manufacturers - it make remote disaster recovery easier (so long as the disk itself is ok).  

I think @v_kyr's suggestion to reinstall on the system drive is a good one, but before you do that I'd install something like EaseUS Partition Manager (the free version) and find out how many partitions and how many physical drives you've got.  Knowing that, you'll be better placed to plan your next move.  

I've tried installing software on different drives in the past.  It wasn't my best idea, but I never had any problems with software not running.  I suspect that reinstalling will give you a more manageable system, but I don't expect it to fix the problem - I hope I'm wrong!

AP, AD & APub user, running Win10

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Maybe it is different for Windows but on Macs all the assets, custom brushes, & so on are stored on a per user basis (so each user account can have its own stuff), not in or with the application. On Macs, these per user items are saved on the startup drive by default -- it is possible to move the user account folder to a different drive but this must be done explicitly in a multi-step process using the command line interface.

So assuming it is similar for Windows, all the assets & such would already be stored on the C drive & just uninstalling & reinstalling the app might be all that is needed ... assuming the uninstall process does not 'helpfully' remove all the per user files as well.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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3 hours ago, IanSG said:

My first thought was  that there's just one physical drive that's been partitioned. 

The total partition size doesn't make sense though, it would be an odd 1.3Tb drive which I'm pretty sure doesn't exist. You can use MSINFO32 to get better details, or use Speccy for hardware clarification.

It's more likely to be a 250GB SSD and a 1TB saga Sata drive. since I went over the 50 saga have been after me they've now infiltrated my keyboard and spellcheckerxD

 

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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11 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Yip that wasn't a good installment idea, since the Affinity apps aren't so called portable Win app versions, meaning those apps who can here be instead installed in an freely choosable independent drive/directory manner from the usual drive C related Win programs folder.

There should be no problem installing on the E: drive rather than the C: drive. I've done that with all my Affinity applications (and many other applications) with no issues at all.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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42 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

There should be no problem installing on the E: drive rather than the C: drive. I've done that with all my Affinity applications (and many other applications) with no issues at all.

In case of the OP it seems to be instead.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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2 hours ago, firstdefence said:

The total partition size doesn't make sense though, it would be an odd 1.3Tb drive which I'm pretty sure doesn't exist.

True!  I admit I did a bit of mental arm waving over how you define disk sizes (I was brought up on 1k = 2^10).  Taking the time to do the arithmetic, it's clear that the 931 GB drive is a 1 TB in marketing units, while the 194 GB drive is probably an SSD that's been partitioned to include the recovery files as drive D.

AP, AD & APub user, running Win10

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3 hours ago, firstdefence said:

It's more likely to be a 250GB SSD and a 1TB saga Sata drive. since I went over the 50 saga have been after me they've now infiltrated my keyboard and spellcheckerxD

xD Yeah, if something has glued deeply into mind (human or computer) you get only hardly rid of it.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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Saved all assets, brushes, palettes and styles and transferred to an external hard-drive. Then I uninstalled using AD exe, and reinstalled to C drive. All my files were still accessible in AD. The crashing results stopped for a little bit then began again. I repeated the process of uninstalling, restarting my computer, reinstalling, and trying to run AD again. It still crashes a little when saving assets. The other thing is it has began crashing when I am working on creating new brushes. I'm not creating huge files or anything so it should be able to cope with it. 

So the only thing I can think of that can be causing this is the latest windows update. I'm not sure if it could do this. But I have had trouble with updates in the past and rolling them back seemed to solve issues in some other programs. Meh, it's worth a try.
 

Yes Firstdefence, It is a 250GB SSD and a 1 TB Sata drive that has been partitioned. Here are the laptops specs https://www.lenovo.com/au/en/lenovo-products/Ideapad-Y700-17/p/88IPY700622

Will let you know how I go with the rollback.

 

Oh, the other strange thing I noticed is when I restart my computer, load AD and draw, it lets me draw all over the canvas in the first instance, Then when I try to draw with the pencil again it will only let me draw on the right side of my page. Also, if I move a vector over to the left side it can no longer be selected or moved. I have tried different settings with no change. Strange. I think I have gremlins on my computer or I totally suck at this. hahahhahaa Yet, AD used to work with no problems at all. So it must be something that has changed that has caused these problems.

 

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1 hour ago, Bibi McMurray said:

Oh, the other strange thing I noticed is when I restart my computer, load AD and draw, it lets me draw all over the canvas in the first instance, Then when I try to draw with the pencil again it will only let me draw on the right side of my page. Also, if I move a vector over to the left side it can no longer be selected or moved. I have tried different settings with no change. Strange. I think I have gremlins on my computer or I totally suck at this. hahahhahaa Yet, AD used to work with no problems at all. So it must be something that has changed that has caused these problems.

That could be a redraw issue. If you move the canvas out of sight, i.e. out of the workspace area and then move it back do the objects appear on the left side?

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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1 hour ago, Bibi McMurray said:

Yes Firstdefence, It is a 250GB SSD and a 1 TB Sata drive

If it's an M.2 they are pretty quick drives, approx 3 x quicker than a standard SSD.

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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2 hours ago, firstdefence said:

That could be a redraw issue. If you move the canvas out of sight, i.e. out of the workspace area and then move it back do the objects appear on the left side?

No unfortunately the shapes still remain the same. I can't select, delete or move them.

 

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The shown exception for AD is related to the Microsoft ucrtbase.dll, which is a C ++ runtime library that comes with Microsoft Visual C ++ Redistributable, either as 2015 or 2017 versions. - It's sometimes causing problems on Win systems after a Windows update etc. You can try to deinstall and reinstall the Microsoft package Visual C ++ 2015 Redistributable (x64) again. Or search the Microsoft Knowledgebase about certain ucrtbase.dll problems and how to fix them.

There are also sources like this Wiki Dll here, which do tell a bunch of possible procedures for ucrtbase.dll handling. Though I first would try a first hand reinstall from Microsoft's redistributable package sources. - Other than that it might also be some associated AD problem after newest Microsoft OS updates.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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23 hours ago, v_kyr said:

The shown exception for AD is related to the Microsoft ucrtbase.dll, which is a C ++ runtime library that comes with Microsoft Visual C ++ Redistributable, either as 2015 or 2017 versions. - It's sometimes causing problems on Win systems after a Windows update etc. You can try to deinstall and reinstall the Microsoft package Visual C ++ 2015 Redistributable (x64) again. Or search the Microsoft Knowledgebase about certain ucrtbase.dll problems and how to fix them.

There are also sources like this Wiki Dll here, which do tell a bunch of possible procedures for ucrtbase.dll handling. Though I first would try a first hand reinstall from Microsoft's redistributable package sources. - Other than that it might also be some associated AD problem after newest Microsoft OS updates.

Thanks so much for your help. I'll try that. Hopefully it will work. I just checked. There are so many Microsoft V C's. Do I really need all those on my computer?

 

 

image.png.9c6dd8e13d6bd7aa357025c673401167.png

Edited by Bibi McMurray
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Different versions of the Visual C++ Redistributable are used by different applications.
Newer versions sometimes omit things that older versions have – or otherwise work in different ways – and therefore some applications may not be able to run with a newer version, which is why you have lots, each being used by one or more applications that need it.
If you have any particular one then it’s probable that one of the apps you have installed needs it.
They all just sit around on disk waiting to be used so they don’t take up any ‘in-use resources’ (unless something is using them).
Permanently uninstalling any one may cause problems but reinstalling one or more should be okay.

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40 minutes ago, Bibi McMurray said:

There are so many Microsoft V C's. Do I really need all those on my computer?

Well I know it looks somehow always strange and chaotic to have so much of them, but sadly they are needed by certain software which installed those along their installment since they relay on those specific ones. - See also ...

... and down on page the comments there. ;)

 

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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10 hours ago, GarryP said:

Different versions of the Visual C++ Redistributable are used by different applications.
Newer versions sometimes omit things that older versions have – or otherwise work in different ways – and therefore some applications may not be able to run with a newer version, which is why you have lots, each being used by one or more applications that need it.
If you have any particular one then it’s probable that one of the apps you have installed needs it.
They all just sit around on disk waiting to be used so they don’t take up any ‘in-use resources’ (unless something is using them).
Permanently uninstalling any one may cause problems but reinstalling one or more should be okay.

Hi GarryP, thanks for clarifying this.

It seems a very inefficient way to do things, though I get it, but with the brilliant minds of today they couldn't think of a way to combine updates that would be valid and usable by all programs.  

I definitely won't delete any of them, I just need to maybe update the one that is causing my AD crashing issue.

Thanks again for your help. :)

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10 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Well I know it looks somehow always strange and chaotic to have so much of them, but sadly they are needed by certain software which installed those along their installment since they relay on those specific ones. - See also ...

... and down on page the comments there. ;)

 

Hi V_kyr,

Thanks so much for your reply and the links. It's very interesting to read. They mention an update that combines some of these so I will try to find that file and install it. Hopefully that will help. If not I will try to find out the one that is causing the AD crashing issues and hopefully then I can continue my artistic journey. 

Have an awesome day/night. Stay inspired. x

 

Downloaded and installed image.thumb.png.8621bfea433e37d8fe7b9f6675ce7a9f.png

Restarted my comp and tried running AD again. It crashed again. I'm going to try to find the VC Rp that is causing the prob and try to reinstall it. I'm at wits end trying to solve this. Thanks so much for your help. x

Edited by Bibi McMurray
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Hi V_kyr,

Thanks so much for your reply and the links. It's very interesting to read. They mention an update that combines some of these so I will try to find that file and install it. Hopefully that will help. If not I will try to find out the one that is causing the AD crashing issues and hopefully then I can continue my artistic journey. 

Have an awesome day/night. Stay inspired. x

 

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Hi guys, I'm not sure how to open this crash file as it is a dmp file and I don't have a program that can see it.  I've added it here in hope that someone will be able to view and see why AD is crashing. I have searched the forum and online for other people who have had crashing problems but none of their issues seem the same. Some that are I have tried their solutions. I might have missed something so I'll keep searching.

If there are any developers on this forum it would be so helpful if you had any ideas to the crashing problem.

Thanks

P.S I am so grateful for all the help I have received so far. You guys are awesome. I know you take your precious time to reply and I thank you so much for that. xx

Crash file AD Bibi McMurray.zip

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