Affinity Designer "not responding" in irregular intervals, will not start again unless Windows is restarted

[tldngr]

Hello everyone,

let me start with: I'm not an English native speaker so please excuse my mistakes

Hope this is the correct place for this thread.

 

I really loved Affinity Designer in the beginning, since it was running smoothly and it's very intuitive to use.

However, lately it tends to crash completely:

• In irregular intervals, Affinity Designer stops responding to input (seems not connected to what tool I'm using at that moment) and says "not responding".
• I have to open the task manager and terminate the Affinity Designer task.
• It's not possible to restart Affinity, since it goes directly back to "not responding" when I try to.
• The only solution is to completely reboot the PC and restart Windows.
• This is happening more frequently, which makes it basically pointless to even try using Affinity.

I already tried to google this problem and I can say the following:

•  I have none of the third party software installed that is known to cause issues and is listed in this thread: 

 

• I switched off OpenCL hardware acceleration. This did not fix the issue.
• I checked if I have the latest version of graphics card drivers (I do).
• I tried to identify correlations between the crashes and what I was doing at that moment or what other software was running. Couldn't pinpoint one though.

I'm running Affinity Designer on a machine with an up-to-date Windows 10, Intel Iris Xe Graphics and 16gb of RAM.

Also, I tried to find a crash dump, but the folder: %AppData%\Affinity\Designer\1.0\CrashReports\reports is empty.

Now I don't know what to do anymore. Unfortunately, I really need Affinity Designer right now to create nice images for my thesis, which is the original reason why I purchased it.

So I'd be thrilled, if someone could help me with this. Thanks in advance.

[Pšenda]

21 minutes ago, tldngr said:

However, lately it tends to crash completely

Has anything happened recently that could negatively affect the running of the application? - updating ADesigner, OS, video driver, ....

 

21 minutes ago, tldngr said:

I really need

You can try the trial version of APublisher or APhoto, which can open ADesigner files, and you can (at least partially* and for a short time - 10 days) continue working. Alternatively, this will show that the problem is not only in ADesigner, but also in other applications.
*) I recommend APublisher, because using StudioLink and its Design Persona you could replace the functions of ADesigner.

 

Edit: Does it happen on all files, or just one / some? Is it a large file (lots of objects)? Try saving it with SaveAs, and then working with the copy.

Edited April 22, 2022 by Pšenda

[tldngr]

Thank you for the quick reply 🙂

15 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Has anything happened recently that could negatively affect the running of the application? - updating ADesigner, OS, video driver, ....

Not that I know of, besides the regular OS updates of course. Since they are running automatically in the background, I didn't register if the first crash occured after such an update.

17 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Edit: Does it happen on all files, or just one / some? Is it a large file (lots of objects)? Try saving it with SaveAs, and then working with the copy.

It seems to be independent of the file. Sometimes, I can restart Windows and Affinity and go on working on the file I worked on when it crashed for quite some time, sometimes it crashes again after only a couple of minutes. Also, sometimes I just started adding objects when it crashes, so there are not that many.

20 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

You can try the trial version of APublisher or APhoto, which can open ADesigner files, and you can (at least partially* and for a short time - 10 days) continue working. Alternatively, this will show that the problem is not only in ADesigner, but also in other applications.
*) I recommend APublisher, because using StudioLink and its Design Persona you could replace the functions of ADesigner.

Thank you, I'll try Publisher. Can't be a permanent solution though. I might need to change images at a later stage and I don't necessarily want to purchase Publisher. But I'll try this.

[carl123]

Also, check the basics when things start slowing down such as memory usage and disk space on Drive C

(Affinity apps can create some huge temp/working files)

 

 

 

[Callum]

Hi tldngr,

When Affinity crashes and wont re-open can you see any processes for Affinity still running in task manager?

Thanks
C

[tldngr]

On 4/22/2022 at 5:45 PM, carl123 said:

Also, check the basics when things start slowing down such as memory usage and disk space on Drive C

It does not slow down, it works fine up until the moment it just stops doing anything. Everything else besides Affinity still works normally. I don't see anything unusual concerning memory usage or disk space.

27 minutes ago, Callum said:

When Affinity crashes and wont re-open can you see any processes for Affinity still running in task manager?

I can't see any processes I can identify as specific for Affinity still running. However, it's possible there are processes connected to Affinity that I don't recognise as such. Do you know the names of the processes I should check for?

Thanks a lot!

[tldngr]

Hello everyone,

I took a break working on my thesis but started again recently.

Affinity Designer worked fine for two days, now it starts to crash again.

As recommended, I tried Publisher and experienced the same problem. Also, once Designer crashed, it's not possible to start Punlisher either (and vice versa), because it immediately goes into "not responding". So unfortunately, purchasing Publisher is not a solution.

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks