XMetaL crash in csstoxsl.dll

[james_uc]

Hi All

I'm having a recurrent crash in XMetaL 6.0. It doesn't quite sound like other ones that have been mentioned. Symptoms/details are:

1. Crash seems to only happen when building large maps (corresponding to 100+ page publications). It isn't every time, but often enough to be a serious problem.
2. I've checked after a few crashes and the error is in csstoxsl.dll.
3. Error isn't always at the same point in the build. A couple of times the build seems to have finished and produced the output file as expected but then crashed. Sometimes it's partway through.
4. Machines have previously had XMetaL 5.1 and now are upgraded to 6.0.
5. Machines are Macs, running Windows XP in a VM (Parallels).
6. We've got Sophos anti-virus, it's a corporate network so I probably can't do much to change this.

By default, my next step will probably be to do a full re-install, removing all traces of any previous version of XMetaL. Does anyone have other suggestions?

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[Derek Read]

This seems very odd. I'll have a look at our scripts but this DLL should not come into play at all for DITA.

This DLL looks at the current CSS used to style your document during editing and generates an XSLT file used to transform your document into HTML when previewing in Page Preview, but it is not used for DITA. For DITA the DITA OT is run if you switch to Page Preview to generate either HTML or PDF.

I would think a reinstall might help, but not necessarily if the DLL in question really is this one. There have never been any reports of crashes with this DLL until now, but the real issue here is that it should not even be running in the first place.

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[james_uc]

Hi Derek

Thanks for the reply. I must say I was a bit puzzled by the name of the dll – it just didn't sound like it should be involved. I'll try reinstalling and see if that fixes it. I'll let you know the outcome – it'll probably be a couple of weeks before I get a chance to do it.

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[james_uc]

UPDATE – the expected reinstall didn't happen. But, I'm no longer treating this as an XMetaL problem as such.

When an editor was working from home for a couple of months last year, we found that the problem didn't happen anymore. And this was with exactly the same machine and same XMetaL install. Also, everything was much faster when connecting remotely to our network, rather than when locally. It appears we have a specific issue with our network being extremely slow sometimes. It's still not clear exactly how this could cause a crash in XMetaL – possibly a network operation timing out at some point during the build? But anyway, XMetaL is not in the frame for this one anymore.

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