With Version 3.2, I was hoping for less access violations, but it's still happening.

[bookman]

With the release of 3.2, I was hoping for less access violations, but alas, it is still happening.

I actually stopped using Version 3.1 for a while because of this.

It is a somewhat difficult thing for us to send the entire database over each time to be diagnosed each time we encounter such a problem because there would be confidential information in the database as well.

I think Kinook must find a solution to this problem as it does makes one feel uneasy that somewhere along the way, we may lose data without even knowing about it.

Is there a debug build for UltraRecall 3.2 ?

What does all these access violations mean anyway ?

Apart from one other program, I have never encountered such Access Violations with other application programs.

Perhaps such problems manifest in other ways, such as the famous BSOD for Windows and I do not have many of those each year.

The only thing I can say is that so far, I have not lost any data (as far as I can tell) due to an access violations.

[cnewtonne]

This is may be not just a coincidence ...

I arrived here at the form today to vent out my frustration and this love-hate relationship with UR. I love it 99% of the time and I hate it when it just disappears or start throwing this AV errors.

I do not want to complain, but I do want to scream load enough for the kinook team to hear us and do something about it.

I had a presentation today I was given out for people at the company. For some reason (and it was a bad one) I decided to user UR to put most of my presentation references. In about 2 hours, it threw 3 AV errors and disappeared once. As much as I got conditioned to expect this, I always hit control+s obsessively since I know it will crash at some point or another. In one of these instances, it crashed before me hitting KB to save it. Even though I did not lose a lot, I just did not remember what is it that I was working on since my last save. It was a text addition/update somewhere, this is all I remember.

I do not remember the UR work flow that precipitated these crashes. it catches me while my attention is so much focused on something else. There is no way for me to be attentive to every click, event, move I perform in UR to tell something you can reproduce.

However, I can tell is almost most of my crashes, it was related to some of these maneuvers ...
- closing tabs.
- Multiple tabs containing web sites or pdf docs.
- Organizing a group of nodes in the tree, specially deletes.


So, kinook, please tell me something new this time. Do not tell me to send you anything because I can't...
- It is all private and corporate confidential stuff
- I can not tell you how to reproduce it.

Also, do not tell me that you have not experienced these crashes. And please DO NOT TELL me to keep number of tabs minimal. I can not believe for a moment that you are not aware or seen these issues.

I do not know what else to say... but let me make some suggestions...

- IMPROVE the Instrumentation of your code to better handle these unexpected exceptions. Truly, the VERY BARE minimum you can do is trap these exceptions as they occur and have UR generate an exception report that can be e-mailed to you. So many apps do this already. I know your time and resources are limited. But BELIEVE me, most if not all users will be fine if you freeze all new features. Take your time to write this and build it into UR.

- please open up you beta testing program to allow us to participate in it. At this point, I personally do not trust your existing beta program. It has proven to be insufficient.

- Freeze all new features. I do not want a single feature added to it. Focus on fixing these major stability issues.

- Hire a software QA person for a short-term contract, may be 6 months. Having work for you full time till it is fixed.

[bookman]

I share your sentiments on this Access Violations (AV) cnewtonne.

This issue should be given the highest priority or UR will just end up losing customers.

I figured that the more I use UR, the more these AVs will weigh on me as I would have to contend with an ever growing risk that I would lose a chunk of my critical data as I use UR more and more.

Despite having paid for UR, I would much rather not use it so long as Access Violations keep rearing their ugly head. I think UR owe it to its users to lick this problem.

I mean, you can give me the most beautiful and efficient aircraft flying at Mach 3, but if on every other flight it crashes, I would rather fly in a trusty old aircraft that gets me there in 3 times the time and rarely if ever crashes.

It's the same with databases.

Peace of mind that the program is stable is far more important than new features right now.

[quant]

Originally posted by bookman
I mean, you can give me the most beautiful and efficient aircraft flying at Mach 3, but if on every other flight it crashes, I would rather fly in a trusty old aircraft that gets me there in 3 times the time and rarely if ever crashes.

It crashes (definitely not on every other flight, my experience is in about 1 in 100 times I run it), but surprisingly, no ones hurt ... so you just carry on ... and you still get to your final point almost 3 times faster ... ;-)

Would I want these Access Violation disappear? Definitely YES! Am I really bothered that much, knowing that I NEVER ever lost any data when I experienced the crash? Definitely NO!

[eno]

I gave up using Ask Sam to use Ultra Recall because UR had features in that I could use that Ask Sam did not, also that the authors of UR do listen to what is said on the forums.

Ask sam was as steady as a rock and on the whole Ultra Recall is but like others have, I do get error messages of one sort or another which is a shame.

Like others often I do not know what caused them and so far I have not lost any data, I have even had the program locked so I have to kill the program to restart it.

I also would like the option of UR generate a report to send to Kinook whenever the program has a problem.

Whether the problems are caused by the interaction of other running programs I do not know.

I have had other programs that have done this and either solved the problem myself, stopped using them or the offending software the company solved the problems for me. I use a lot of programs but these do not get the errors like UR does.

Ultra Recall is a fantastic program, I like it and use it allmost every single day, I believe striving for reliability and ease of use (however complicated a program is) should be of the highest priority, above the introduction of any new features.

Would I recommend Ultra Recall to others? YES, but with hesitations because of the intermittent error problem.

An auto generated error report send to Kinook maybe could help solve some of these problems.

[quant]

Originally posted by eno
An auto generated error report send to Kinook maybe could help solve some of these problems.

this was requested by users some time ago, but Kinook replied that it's not that easy. But if Kinook uses UR as often as we do, they must have experienced the same access violation errors, and should be able to debug it.

Kinook, what's your point of view on this problem?

[Jon Polish]

Originally posted by cnewtonne
<snip>I arrived here at the form today to vent out my frustration and this love-hate relationship with UR. I love it 99% of the time and I hate it when it just disappears or start throwing this AV errors.

I do not want to complain, but I do want to scream load enough for the kinook team to hear us and do something about it.<snip>

<snip>So, kinook, please tell me something new this time. Do not tell me to send you anything because I can't...
- It is all private and corporate confidential stuff
- I can not tell you how to reproduce it.

Also, do not tell me that you have not experienced these crashes. And please DO NOT TELL me to keep number of tabs minimal. I can not believe for a moment that you are not aware or seen these issues.

I do not know what else to say... but let me make some suggestions...

- IMPROVE the Instrumentation of your code to better handle these unexpected exceptions. Truly, the VERY BARE minimum you can do is trap these exceptions as they occur and have UR generate an exception report that can be e-mailed to you. So many apps do this already. I know your time and resources are limited. But BELIEVE me, most if not all users will be fine if you freeze all new features. Take your time to write this and build it into UR.

- please open up you beta testing program to allow us to participate in it. At this point, I personally do not trust your existing beta program. It has proven to be insufficient.

- Freeze all new features. I do not want a single feature added to it. Focus on fixing these major stability issues.

- Hire a software QA person for a short-term contract, may be 6 months. Having work for you full time till it is fixed.<snip>

I completely agree and to all of the above I would add one additional observation. The registry tweaks have improved the speed somewhat, but not to the point where UR is competitive with some of its competition. The tweaks can only do so much and they do not fix the underlying problem that the database engine is so darned slow when it comes to importing and exporting items. Recently I imported an mbx file to a new database. 18,319 messages (with attachments) took 4 hours 47 minutes to import. This is outrageous. Please don't tell be about all the background activity going on in UR because the other programs I have in mind all index as well. Import times for these programs is less than 14 minutes and in one case, less than 5 minutes! It is not always practical for me to perform these time intensive operations when the computer is normally idle, which I should not have to do in any case. Work arounds for basic problems are not an answer.

I disagree with Quant about his take on access violations, and I have yet to experience one with any other program on my computer except those I am beta testing and FINAL RELEASES OF UR. With that in mind, why should anyone have to put up with access violations in 3.x final release of a product?

I also grow weary of these gripes. What has been discussed in this thread are fundamental issues which should be resolved before mucking about with new features.

Jon

[quant]

Originally posted by Jon Polish
Recently I imported an mbx file to a new database. 18,319 messages (with attachments) took 4 hours 47 minutes to import. This is outrageous. Please don't tell be about all the background activity going on in UR because the other programs I have in mind all index as well. Import times for these programs is less than 14 minutes and in one case, less than 5 minutes!

just name the other programs, otherwise your post has little to no value ...

There must be something that underlies the extreme differences in importing time, ... but otoh how often do you import 19000 messages in one go? ;-) Anyway, the performance issues are not the main point of this thread ...

[Jon Polish]

I do not think it proper to mention competitor's programs in a forum graciously hosted by Kinook. Suffice it to say that the programs are older, well established products. That is not to say that they are without flaws - every one that I have used (including UR) have been imperfect. But I was commenting on speed, that's all.

Jon

[quant]

Originally posted by Jon Polish
I do not think it proper to mention competitor's programs in a forum graciously hosted by Kinook. Suffice it to say that the programs are older, well established products.

blaaaah ... not saying the names is worse in this case, cause you might be lying about those performance differences! There might be some aspect of the programs that directly affects the import speed, without specifying which programs it was, really your post had no value ...

You can read the terms when you signed to these forums, there is nothing like competitor soft cannot be mentioned or explicitly compared,

"By clicking the Agree button, you warrant that you will not post any messages that are obscene, vulgar, sexually-orientated, hateful, threatening, or otherwise violative of any laws."

One thing is "compare" the different aspect of various programs, another is criticize without backing your claims ...

[kevina]

Unfortunately we are not experiencing these Access Violations (or the app disappearing), and only a handful of users have reported encountering them, which makes them difficult to identify and resolve.

Does everyone agree that, as has been posited on this thread, the AVs being experienced seem to be tab related?

Could everyone who has posted (or reads the forum and experiences AVs with Ultra Recall) email to support@kinook.com) the info found at Help | About | Install Info? Also include your Internet Explorer version. Finally, please report if you are displaying the Database Toolbar.

Hopefully compiling that list will help identify a common denominator (windows version/SP number, IE version, settings, or some combination) and help us create a trace build focused on resolving these reported problems.

[Jon Polish]

Originally posted by quant
blaaaah ... not saying the names is worse in this case, cause you might be lying about those performance differences! There might be some aspect of the programs that directly affects the import speed, without specifying which programs it was, really your post had no value ...

OK, I'll take the bait. Yes, I might be lying (offense taken) but I am not. The programs are askSam and InfoSelect. I have also developed a way to import to Ecco Pro, albeit without attachments. Finally, there is a way to convert a mbx file to dbf (with all attachments) and then import (almost instantly) into a database program such as FileMaker (which I use).

Jon

[quant]

Originally posted by Jon Polish
OK, I'll take the bait. Yes, I might be lying (offense taken) but I am not.

... meant purely hypothetically, huuuge difference ... no offense intended ...

Originally posted by Jon Polish
The programs are askSam and InfoSelect. I have also developed a way to import to Ecco Pro, albeit without attachments. Finally, there is a way to convert a mbx file to dbf (with all attachments) and then import (almost instantly) into a database program such as FileMaker (which I use).

thanks

[bookman]

Install Info

Ultra Recall Professional 3.2
Registered to: XXXXXXXX (1-user license)
Windows version: 5.1.2600.2.0
Install path: C:\Program Files\UltraRecall
EncryptPDF.dll version 3.0.0.2
mimepp.dll version 3.0.4
pdf2txt.dll version 3.1.0.4
PolarSpellChecker.dll version 4.0.5.4
riched20.dll version 5.50.99.2014
SftPrintPreview_IX86_U_10.dll version 1.05
SftTree_IX86_U_50.dll version 5.06
UltraRecall.exe version 3.2.0.1
unins000.exe version 51.46.0.0
Database filename: E:\datafiles\UltraRecall\NewWithTransfers.urd
Database version: 3.0.12

The AVs I faced are not tab related as currently I use UR to capture webpages and I did add some notes. The AV invariably happens when or during the process of saving the webpages from Firefox 2.0.0.6.

The database toolbar is turned off
I'm using a Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop running
Windows XP SP2 with 1GB of Ram
AVG Free
Windows Defender (Anti Spyware)

[quant]

Originally posted by Jon Polish
OK, I'll take the bait. Yes, I might be lying (offense taken) but I am not. The programs are askSam and InfoSelect.

aaaah, two very competitively priced products

askSam $395 (the indexing version)
InfoSelect $250

but, of course, that's not an excuse for UR to be slow ...

Kinook, could it be the undo feature, or commit command, or some problem with indexing, ... ? The reported differences are of different orders of magnitudes! There must be something ...