menu items sometimes unavailable in XMetal

[sbandy]

I have 5 maps that share approximately 200 topics. Occasionally, menu items appear unavailable (they're greyed-out). For example, when trying to insert a new row or column in a table, the "Insert Rows or Columns" option in the Table menu is greyed out (even though I have my cursor in a table cell). I have to restart XMetal a few times before the menu item becomes available. This is now happening when trying to insert a cross reference. All link options (under Insert, Link) are greyed-out. Has anyone else encountered this issue? Thanks for any comments/help.

[Su-Laine Yeo]

Have you tried restarting XMetaL with the Ctrl key held down? This might be a manifestation of the issue here: http://forums.xmetal.com/index.php?topic=19.0 .

Cheers,
Su-Laine

[dianamost]

This issue just started happening to me as well, and interestingly, I just passed the 200 topic level too!  Rebooting fixes this. And I did review the reply to the original poster, and those conditions (unfortunately) don't apply to my situation as a cause.  Too bad, because holding down Ctrl when opening XMetal would be a fantastically easy fix! :-)

I have other problems too:

+  A crash error every time I close XMetal,
+ Clicking the icon to reopen the program does not work.
+ Clicking the .exe to open the program from the program folder does not work.
+ A Switch/Retry error when I run a local build.*
   (* A JustSystems person said that there must be an ActiveX control that is causing this, but I don't know how that could be? In light of the numerous errors I am having aside from the Switch/Retyr error, I wonder....)

Rebooting fixes these issues, at least for now.

The last time these issues came up, I had to reinstall the program to make the issues go away. They are back again now. And, there are three other people here with the same issues. We are all using version 5.1.

We are hoping there is a patch or a fix for these problems? If anyone has input, I'd be delighted to have it!

Thanks much.
Diana

[Su-Laine Yeo]

I don't know what causes this problem, however we have many customers using maps with more than 200 topics, and so far I haven't heard of issues that arose when the number of topics reached a certain number.

I know this is kind of a last resort, but you might want to give the following "complete uninstall/reinstall" procedure a try on one machine to see if it helps: http://forums.xmetal.com/index.php?topic=67.0

For XMetaL 5.5, we fixed a bug that was intermittently causing XMetaL to not launch. So there is a small chance that upgrading to XMetaL 5.5 might solve your problem.

Regards,
Su-Laine

[mag3737]

Some of these problems sound to me worthy of "escalating" beyond this Forum.  If these problems are reproducible and are an (as-yet) unidentified but real problem with XMetaL, I would urge those of you who are having the problem to file a request through our support channel (http://na.justsystems.com/contact-support.php) so that our support team can work with you and our dev team to identify and solve the issue.

[dianamost]

Thanks to both who answered.

I have tried the uninstall and reinstall in the past, and it did solve the problems for a period of time. Upgrading to 5.5 -- that I will have to check on, but it is a very good suggestion. I will find out if that is possible.

So far in the last couple of days, I am only seeing the Switch/Retry message, and not having the other problems, but I will go ahead and call support as soon as my deadline and several days of team meetings are over.

Thanks again,
Diana

[Derek Read]

The following two issues described by dianamost sound related to a known issue that was corrected with the release of 5.5:

+ Clicking the icon to reopen the program does not work.
+ Clicking the .exe to open the program from the program folder does not work.

The problem was caused by XMetaL Author checking to see if there were other instances of XMetaL Author already running at startup (which we've always done). With the 5.1 release the application would send messages to all other currently running apps (via a Windows call) and wait for a response to say "I'm another copy of XMetaL" (in which case the second copy passes control over to the first) or "I'm product whatever" (in which case it will be ignored). In the case where a particular application does not respond XMetaL Author Enterprise 5.1 will wait indefinitely for a response, appearing to be hung in Task Manager and never completing the launch process. Rebooting often corrects this issue, though it may not if one of these other applications starts up at boot time.

The problem does not occur for the vast majority of clients because most applications will respond to such calls.

For clients that must continue to run the 5.1 release (for whatever reason), if your maintenance is current, please contact XMetaL Support for a patched xmetal51.exe binary file that can be dropped into an existing install. This process is manual (no installer is provided). It fixes the particular issue described above (which may or may not be related to the other issues described on this thread).

For those clients that have the option to upgrade to the 5.5 release I would recommend doing that instead.