Zotero and LibreOffice Plugin Freeze

This sounds as if it may be the same issue listed under "[Closed] Zotero and LibreOffice Plugin Freeze - Error Id 751903508".

I have been using LibreOffice Portable and Firefox Portable for a while with fairly good results. However, when I've been using it recently I have been encountering instances where it will be working fine and while in the process of inserting another reference into a LibreOffice document both LibreOffice and Firefox freeze. Only way I've found to clear the issue so far is to use the Task Manager to kill the Firefox session. Once this is done, if I restart Firefox, I can generally insert at least one more reference before the process occurs again.

On checking the document after killing the Firefox session, you can see that it has inserted the reference into the body text, but not into the bibliography. If you click the Refresh button in the Zotero toolbar, the system will complete the insertion into the bibliography.

As with the other entry for this issue, once I killed Firefox, I'd get a series of two Error windows opening up. Both had the header 'Zotero Integration' and both contained the body text 'OpenOffice.org could not communicate with Zotero. Please ensure Firefox or Zotero Standalone is open and set to an online state and try again.' Clicking on anything else in Firefox before killing the session just resulted in a message saying that Firefox was not responding.

Additionally, before I killed the Firefox session, I took some screen shots of the Windows Task Manager displays. What I found interesting is that under the Applications tab there appeared to be duplicate entries for the sessions. That is, going down the Task list I saw the following sequence of Tasks:
1) Firefox icon displaying the ID "Best Free Hard Drive Health Monitoring & Diagnostic Programs - Mozilla Firefox"
2) A generic Windows icon displaying the ID "Add/Edit Citation".
3) A generic Windows icon displaying the ID "Add/Edit Citation".
4) Firefox icon displaying the ID "Best Free Hard Drive Health Monitoring & Diagnostic Programs - Mozilla Firefox"

When I used the Task Manager to kill the Firefox session, all four of these icons disappeared. I don't know what sessions should normally show up in the Task manager, but it looks almost as if something is trying to open two sessions, instead of one, which is generating some type of lock. I suppose it is possible that the system is attempting to open two different connections to the same port, but I have no idea why, nor why the issue would appear to random. I would have posted the screen shots, but saw no way to add them to the board. If they would be helpful to you, I'll be happy to e-mail them to you, just specify and e-mail address.

As I am running both LibreOffice and Firefox as portable apps, I know that neither one of those updated recently, but it is possible that one of the Firefox plugins did. The only other possible system changes that I'm aware of is that the office IT group has a tendency to just push down updates to general components without bothering to notify anyone. I know that at least one Adobe component was pushed down last week that caused some heartburn, Adobe Shockwave Player v.11.5.8.612 I believe. While that appeared to have corrupted some video drivers, I don't know that there would be any interplay with the Zotero plug-ins, but without knowing how they are written, I can't be sure of that. I will continue to troubleshoot that in the office on Tuesday.

Currently running Firefox 4.0 on Windows XP with Service Pack 3 with Zotero 2.1.8 and Zotero OpenOffice.Org Integration 3.5a2. LibreOffice version is 3.3.2 OOO330m19 (Build:202) tab libreoffice-3.3.2.2. Machine is currently a HP Compaq 8510p dual core laptop. I can dump the full system configuration for you, if you desire, but I suspect that would be overkill at the moment.

Any assistance that you can provide would be greatly appreciated. While I have experienced some other minor problems with Zotero (e.g. sometime reference numbers are correctly super-scripted while other times they're not), I don't think they have any relation to this issue.

Thanks,

John
  • Hi, don't know if that helps, but for me, the bug went away after I upgraded everything: LibreOffice version 3.3.3, Firefox Portable version 5.0, Zotero 2.1.8 and Zotero word integration 3.5a2. My Java is also always up-to-date although I have a hard time imagining that the java jre could be the culprit...
  • Thanks for the suggestion, unfortunately, it proved only partially successful. I was able to get to the point where I was able to get the toolbar to work, but it would only show as text, without any icons. I tried reinstalling things several times and sometimes the toolbar would load as 'Zotero' and sometimes it would be visible, but listed as 'Add-On 1' . I wish there were a way to embed graphics into these comments, it would make things a lot clear by taking a lot of the interpretation out of the process.

    One thing I noticed in LibreOffice was that if I went to the 'Extension Manager' and clicked on 'Check for Updates...' it would open the 'Extension Update' window and say that there were none. However, if I then clicked on the 'Show all updates' check box the top 'Available extension updates' pane would display 'Zotero OpenOffice Integration' with an Alert icon in front of it. At the same time, the bottom 'Description' pane displayed the following message:

    An error occurred:
    Start tag expected, '<' not found
    Line:1
    Column: 1

    This doesn't seem to happen unless the Zotero integration plug-in is installed. Whether it is significant or not, I don't know. It's possible that this error would just be a red herring.

    At the moment, with trying to perform additional testing Zotero's performance appears to be getting worse and worse. When it's working (and it sounds like some of the past issues were actually due to Windows, as opposed to native bugs) I've found it to be a very helpful product, but spending +95% of your time trying to hold the system together as opposed to actually using it is getting old fast.

    I noticed on the PortableApps site that LibreOffice 3.4.1 should be released soon (the beta can be downloaded now), so maybe that will fix some of these issues.

    Thanks again for your suggestions,

    John
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