Pixinsight Routinely Crashes

[SkyExplorer]

I am an avid user of PixInsight and love the program.  But alas, in any given day that I use PixInsight, I am assured it will crash 2-5 times a day or more.  It is rather disheartening.  Especially if I am not saving constantly.  What usually happens is I have to go to the icon files that get automatically backed up and regenerate my images and that can often take hours to do.  The alternative is to save my intermediate images along the way and with history as Projects, that too can take 30 minutes or more to save and requires a lot of disk space.

I think it is a memory problem or graphics card problems maybe?  The crashes seem to happen almost always after I push the "Auto Stretch" on the Screen Transfer Function dialog.   I am using 01.08.04.1195, but well before I applied the latest updates, this problem happened. 

My system is a recently purchased Dell XPS system with 16GB RAM, Windows 10 Home, Intel Core I7 and I have two solid state drives. 

Nothing else I use crashes and my system works flawlessly other than when I use the STF inside PixInsight. I am sure I have plenty of disk space and the Swap Storage directories have plenty of space as well.  Even if it is a limitation on my system, something other than a crash would be helpful since the crash is sudden and final.

Since I have Visual Studio 2015 on my system, I am attaching the pop error dialog and the exception code if that is of any help.  This is (as of right now at least) easily reproducible.  Oh yes, one more thing.  It seems to happen mostly when I do an auto-stretch just after running drizzle integration and it is the drizzled integrated image that I am using the STF on when it crashes.

Bryan
 

[JGMoreau]

Same thing here, also on Win10, with OSC camera.
Reverted to previous version, works perfectly.

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Bryan,

I'm very sorry to hear you have these problems. Needless to say this is very strange and irreproducible on any of our machines. Seems to be another incarnation of this problem, but I am not sure, really. I have tried to reproduce these issues hundreds of times without success.

Two quick questions:

- Does your laptop have a touch screen? I am about to include a note in our system requirements page about incompatibility with touch screens on Windows 10.

- Have you solved this known problem with Dell's utility software?

[JGMoreau]

Hi Juan, in my case, no touch screen, not a Dell machine.

[SkyExplorer]

Juan:

There is no touch screen and I have not tried using Dell's Utility software.  This system is a desktop, but the box is a reduced size, compact foot print.  Not a laptop.

I *think* the crash has happened at times other than when I press the auto-STF button in the past, but it is infrequent enough that I have not noticed.  But for this particular session with the 43 light frames I am combining, I can get the crash to happen every time I run the DrizzleIntegration and then press auto-STF.  I can use auto-STF on any other image and it works fine.  And this morning, I tried saving my Drizzled output file as 64-bit to disk, then re-opening the file.  With that, I did not get a crash using the auto-STF.  So for me, the work-around is to save the drizzle image and re-open.  I have not tried saving the project, existing and re-opening the project file (including the Drizzle image), but my guess is that this would also work. 

This morning, I have been paying attention to any time I use auto-STF and it was used a dozen times or more this morning on all kinds of images and no crashes. 

I would be happy to offer any assistance I can.  If you have a .pdb file I can put on my system, that should allow me to get you a full stack trace without having a debug build. 

I will try the recommendations on the link you included.  Those are simple enough and I will give you feedback on those today so we can confirm it is with the Dell QT DLL version.

Hope that helps. 

Bryan

[SkyExplorer]

So I did a bit of poking around.  I do not have the Dell Backup/Recovery utility installed.  I do have 6 Dell utilities installed and two of them are for configuring my Alienware computer settings (overclocking for example).  So I am not sure I want to uninstall all of my Dell applications.  There are several there that I can uninstall and I may try that along the way.

I tried unchecking the use native dialog option and that seemed to fix the problem.  Then I turned it back on and the problem still didn't happen.  Then I tried clearing the DrizzleIntegration file list and re-loading the list, this time using the native dialog and still, no crash.

So to summarize, just by unchecking the "Use native file dialogs" box and opening a non-native file dialog, the problem for the project I currently have open seems to be fixed with no more crashes. 

Next I tried existing from Pix-Insight and re-running Pix-Insight and reloading my project.  Still with the "Use native File Dialog" box checked.  Even with this, the crash did not happen.  I assume the memory is being randomly loaded so all bets are off when the crash happens again.  I like the native dialogs so I am going to see how far I can get before a crash.

Thanks,

Bryan