Zotero & OpenOffice crashing repeatedly :/

viil
Hi,

Zotero and Open Office Writer keeps crashing whenever I am trying to add a new reference into my phd dissertation with multiple existing Zotero references. I have been working on this document for a while with no problems, but today it started crashing more or less every time I try to add a reference. Zotero freeze up and get unresponsive and then Open Office crashes. I have tried restarting everything in case there were processes hanging etc. but that doesn't seem to help either :(

I am running Zotero stand alone 3.0.13 together with Open Office 3.4.1 on Windows 7.

Any help or tips on how to fix this would be very welcome!
Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    does Zotero become responsive after Ooo crashes? In that case provide an error report ID:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_bugs#provide_a_report_id

    If not, see if this also occurs in a new document.
  • viil
    Thanks for responding so promptly Adam.

    Here is a screen shot of the Zotero error message I have been getting http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=161zshv&s=6.

    I haven't been getting this error message every time Ooo crashes when entering a Zotero reference, but I suspect that may be because I get impatient waiting for it to unfreeze and I end up killing the processes.

    The Zotero stand alone does not freeze, only the integration with Ooo and then ultimately Ooo crashes.
  • adamsmith
    the above link doesn't work - it leads me to a generic photobucket recent uploads page.
  • viil
    I have sent an error report from Zotero stand alone, ID: 1680765715

    Thanks for looking into it!
  • viil
    Sorry about the link to the screen shot, try this: http://tinypic.com/r/161zshv/6
  • adamsmith
    I don't think we've ever seen this before, Simon would have to take a look at the error.
    You could try installing LibreOffice & see if that works better, it's used and tested more extensively.
  • viil
    Thanks Adam, I might have to do that so I can proceed working on my PhD dissertation :/

    Here is some more information about what happened that may or may not be useful as you are looking into this:

    This started today after no upgrades or other changes to my system in general. It happened within an existing document where Zotero was already managing 100+ existing references. When attempting to add new references (or edit existing ones) Ooo consistently froze and no Zotero reference input pop-up form was displayed. A couple of times the Zotero error message I sent to you would be displayed after some time, the other times I ended up restarting either the programs or my computer (which is relatively new and should not be the issue here). Out of about 30 attempts of adding references to the document 2 were successful. The others resulted in Ooo freezing.
  • Simon
    OpenOffice is reporting a memory allocation error when Zotero tries to enumerate the text in the selected paragraph. I don't really have much insight here. If your document contains a lot of large images or if you are nearly out of hard disk space, that could cause this, or it could be a bug in OpenOffice. In any case, try LibreOffice first.
  • viil
    Hi Simon,

    Hard disk space is not an issue and I have not experienced any other issues with my laptop since I got it a couple of months ago. The document only contains a handful of small optimized illustrations in addition to text.

    I installed LibreOffice as Adam suggested and the same happens again :( LibreOffice crashes when I try to insert a reference with Zotero. If I try to close Zotero it leaves processes running on my machine which I need to kill (or reboot the machine) before I can restart Zotero again.
  • viil
    BTW: integration issues due to memory limitations with Ooo was why I moved from Mendeley to Zotero a couple of months ago. You can see their error thread about the issue here: http://support.mendeley.com/customer/portal/questions/295855-soffice-error-response-too-long

    As far as I remember their problem seemed to be related to putting a lot of reference meta data into the Ooo limited temporary memory so that any document with a certain amount of references would hit the limit and get errors. Mendely says they have identified the problem and will include a fix in their next version (whenever that is).

    However my dissertation is due in a couple of weeks and right now I am not able to add or edit any references in it :(
  • viil
    Hi again,

    my Zotero document preferences for the document in question are set to "Format using ReferenceMarks" and "store references in document". I am wondering if the stored references is what is conflicting with Ooo memory limits? In any case it doesn't seem like I can change that setting to test this :/
  • adamsmith
    You could try this:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/word_processor_plugin_troubleshooting#debugging_broken_documents
    specifically step 8.
    There are three possibilities after splitting the doc in two:
    1. Both halves of the document continue to crash, in which case you can stop, but we don't know anything more
    2. Only one half continues to crash - in which case it'd be worth continuing to hunt for a corrupted citation
    3. Both halves work - in which case you could change the Store References settings in one and add the other using copy&paste
  • viil
    edited February 18, 2013
    Hi Adam,
    thanks for suggesting this. I did the following:

    1. made a new document and copied my content there -> adding references still caused crashes

    2. removed 3 references I had in figure captions (I had no problems putting them there in the first place, and they have been there through multiple versions of the document. I was unaware of this being an issue with Zotero before I saw it on the list you linked to) -> adding references still caused crashes

    3. changed the document preferences to Format using Bookmarks -> adding references still caused crashes

    4. deleted the bibliography and added it again. At this point most of my references looked like they were unlinked (no gray background) with the exception of some older ones -> adding references still caused crashes

    5. After restarting Ooo at this point the references suddenly all looked linked again and I was able to add new references without any issues! (Strangely the document preferences had been reset to Format using ReferenceMarks, even though I had saved the document several times after changing those preferences to Bookmarks).

    So, right now it looks like I can update and add references in my dissertation (I am still worried it will start crashing again).
    Do you think it was the references in the three figure captions that were the problem?

    BTW: I have sent you an updated error report with ID 886656200.

    Thanks for your help, hope you figure out what caused all this.
  • DWL-SDCA
    Please be sure to save a copy of your working document. That way, if the problem arises again you will have good versions. (I kept 10 sequencial working copies of my doctoral thesis.) Zotero can cope with very long documents. My thesis was 296 pages, more than 450 items in the reference list and about 600 in-text citations.
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