[Z7 Beta] Could not open Zotero after LibreOffice crash.

samvimes
Hi all,
I've just encountered the following problem.
I've been working in a somewhat longer (37 pages) word document and had just tried to add a citation - after entering it the Zotero loading bar showed up for a few seconds before LibreOffice crashed. After restarting LibreOffice, I noticed that Zotero buttons weren't doing anything, so I restarted Zotero. When opening it, however, a window showed up displaying the following message:

this.init@chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/zotero.js:238:5
ZoteroService@jar:file:///home/samvimes/Software/Zotero_Beta/Zotero_linux-x86_64/app/omni.ja!/components/zotero-service.js:351:23
createInstance@resource://gre/modules/ComponentUtils.jsm:90:19
@chrome://zotero/content/include.js:5:3
@chrome://global/content/commonDialog.xhtml:34:25
openWindowPrompt@resource://gre/modules/Prompter.jsm:1226:17
openPrompt@resource://gre/modules/Prompter.jsm:1067:12
openPromptSync@resource://gre/modules/Prompter.jsm:1046:10
alert@resource://gre/modules/Prompter.jsm:1329:17
alert@resource://gre/modules/Prompter.jsm:80:7

Below were the buttons "Quit" and "Search for Update". After pressing the latter it searched for a while and told me that there a no updates available. After doing this twice, I was suddenly able to open Zotero normally. A bit scary (I know I shouldn't be using the Beta for important work and I do have backups, but still...)

I tried to reproduce the error, but even though it took quite unusually long to enter the citation, this time LibreOffice didn't crash. Nevertheless, here's the DebugID for the second attempt: D1991413584
  • adomasven
    What version of LibreOffice are you using? LibreOffice 24 is quite unstable, so you should use LibreOffice 7 if possible. Generally LibreOffice crashes are caused either by issues in Java or LibreOffice.
  • samvimes
    I'm on version 7.6.5.2. This is the first crash I've had in LibreOffice since quite a while. I've also never encountered the case that after a LibreOffice crash Zotero wouldn't open.
  • adomasven
    Right. Generally Zotero throwing errors upon open would be unrelated to LibreOffice crashing, although there is a tiny possibility there's some general system instability on your machine, especially if it's an older one, like an old hard drive being close to failure, or if you have some malware, although both are very unlikely to cause the kind of behavior you're describing.
  • samvimes
    I think both scenarios are rather unlikely; the machine is less than two years old and hasn't shown any other issues and as it's a Linux machine I doubt there's any malware involved. I know that correlation doesn't imply causation but the error occurring immediately after the LO crash makes me think both are related.

    If it happens again I'll try to see whether I can figure out the exact cause and whether it's possible to reproduce.
  • adomasven
    Either way we are very much interested if you are able to reproduce the LO crash, or the Zotero failure to start consistently, either together or separately.
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