Zotero Standalone on Windows 7

JJSDataDrop · November 10, 2017

I've installed the latest Zotero 5 stand alone on Windows 7, and seem to be experiencing some sort of undocumented issue. The executable runs without complaint - I can see that it is running in Task Manager and other application monitoring software (e.g. Commodo) - but there is no Zotero display/GUI present, of any kind. I'd appreciate any thoughts about how to further debug this or some kind of settings I can change.

adomasven · November 10, 2017

Press Win+R and type in the path to zotero.exe, then add -ZoteroDebug -jsconsole at the end. You might get some debugging windows which should shed some light on this.

dstillman · November 10, 2017

Detailed instructions here: https://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_problems#reporting_startup_errors

JJSDataDrop · November 11, 2017

Thanks, those suggestions helped a lot & I got it working. So what was the problem? The program was either hanging or going absurdly slow on startup due to an environment it was unhappy with including: a) a Zotero 4 database to update, b) a version of Java JRE dating to Feb. 2013, c) a version of LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice that was a few years old, and d) no MicrosoftOffice or OpenOffice. Confronting those things send it into a tail spin on startup. It's running fine now after upgrading all 3 to current versions.

dstillman · November 11, 2017

To be clear, those were just for providing more info, not for fixing anything. But glad it's working now.

a version of LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice that was a few years old

Do you mean OpenOffice instead of LibreOffice? While it shouldn't impact Zotero startup, LibreOffice is what you want to be using.

JJSDataDrop · November 12, 2017

Yeah, I understood that the flags were only for diagnostics, but sometimes software behaves differently in debug mode, even when it is not supposed to. In both cases, the program was taking a large amount of time - at least 30-60 seconds or so - before making any kind of GUI on startup. Running without the diagnostics, I never saw anything, but perhaps I killed it and retried "too soon". With the diagnostics, I got messages about having trouble looking for Open Office and Microsoft Office, which appeared before the actual GUI.

I am only using LibreOffice these days, but the Zotero installation messages only mention OpenOffice and indicated trouble finding what they were looking for with the few year old version that was installed there. I suggest it would be a good idea to warn users who are new to the Zotero standalone, installing it for the first time, that there is a JRE dependency and they want an uptodate JRE.

dstillman · November 12, 2017

Zotero already should warn about the Java requirement during installation, but it might take a few seconds to run the necessary Java tests before displaying a message. The main Zotero UI should display first, but it's possible that's not happening in all cases.

adomasven · November 13, 2017

Just to clarify:

Zotero itself does not require JRE. What you were seeing in the debug log window was Zotero attempting to install its document processor plugins. That only happens on the first time you run Zotero upon installation, usually takes a few seconds and shouldn't interfere with displaying the main Zotero window.

The Zotero LibreOffice plugin (which is internally still called OpenOffice plugin, since initially it was developed for OpenOffice) requires JRE, but once again, if you don't use LibreOffice with Zotero, that should be irrelevant.