Frequent crahes of Affinity Apps (Win10)

[dost]

Hi there

As many others report in this Forum, I experience frequent crashes of all three Affinity Apps on Windows 10 (Designer, Publisher, Photos). With the 1.10 version, the amount of crashes reached a level, where it became basically impossible to work with the Affinity Apps. Had to buy Adobe licences again to keep working on my projects - but I'd really love to do it with Affinity.

Problem description

• Affinity programs freezing, "(not responding)" shown in the title bar.
• Only possibility to close the program is via Windows Task Manager.
• After such a crash happened, all Affinity Apps are freezing already on startup. I have to restart the computer to make it work again.
• These crashes often happen when switching back to Affinity from another window (e.g. Word, Browser, etc.).
• These problems occur since more or less a year now, but it got worse. Haven't found a working solution in the Forums yet.
• Crashes are not related to any specific files, they can happen even with a completely empty new document.

Not working solutions

I already tried the following - without any success:

• Switching back and forth between the current and older versions of Affinity Software
• Turning off hardware acceleration via "Settings" and via xml-Files as described in this post.
• Checked the List of known issues with third party software and disabled the Capture One Explorer integration als suggested. No other software from the list is installed.
• Updating all drivers
• Complete factory reset of the computer

System

• Windows 10, 20H2
• Lenovo X1 Yoga 2nd Gen
• Intel UHD Graphics 620

Do you know any other solution which might work in this case?

Regards,
Dominic

Edited November 14, 2021 by dost

[stokerg]

Hi @dostand Welcome to the Forums,

Could you attach your latest crash report?  To find the crash report, see this post.

[dost]

Hi @stokerg

Thanks for answering. Unfortunately, it seems that no crash reports are beeing written (or I'm looking at the wrong folder?). When following the instructions in the linked post, I only find an empty folder.

I produced a crash to see, if the folder remains empty, which was the case. After 30 mins of freezing with no crash report written, I shut down the app via Task Manager. See screenshots attached. I also searched for '*.dmp' files on the whole computer and found no Affinity-related file. 

Is there any way I can get the app to produce a crash report?

Edited November 20, 2021 by dost

[GarryP]

Without getting into the technical nitty-gritty of the nomenclature:

• A freeze is not the same thing as a crash.
• A freeze is when the software stops responding (when you would expect it to respond) but continues to run.
• A crash is when the software unexpectedly stops running.
• You will not get a crash report when the software freezes, because it has not crashed.

[v_kyr]

See related for Windows systems here:

• Advanced troubleshooting for Windows-based computer freeze issues

• How to Create, Use, and Debug .NET application Crash Dumps

• Freeze - Troubleshooting Guide (substitute the "ARCHICAD.exe" shown there with "Affinity Progname.exe")

There are also some specific MS sysinternals tools which might be helpful to identify possible freeze causes, like:

• ProcDump
• Process Monitor
• etc.

 

[dost]

Thanks, @GarryP and @v_kyr, will have a look at this tomorrow!