Author Topic: Random PixInsight crashes  (Read 876 times)

Offline brew

  • Newcomer
  • Posts: 47
Random PixInsight crashes
« on: 2017 October 31 23:14:27 »
This is driving me crazy. Every so often PixInsihgt will crash with read access memory erros. Typically it is trying to read address 0 or FFFFFF, but not always.

When it crashes it generates error popups in an infinite loop. As soon as I exit one, another pops up. As a result of the popup I cannot do anything else in PI (like save some files!) or even exit PI. I have to kill it in Task Manager. Of course, all work is lost.

It often seems to occur when I have an image icon on the PI workspace and double click on it to "open" it to do something with it. This was the case with the error shown below. The image had not been used for awhile; it "feels" like it gets confused retrieving from swap, but I obviously don't know that.

I have taken to saving the project regularly (every half hour or so). Unfortunately this is a real pain, because my projects are kind of big (at least to me!) - generally 20 gigabytes or more. It takes several minutes to save.

System Information:
New (2 months old) Windows 10 MSI laptop, 64 bit i7-7700HQ quad processor, 16Gb memory, 512Gb SSD, 1Tb disk drive.
PixInsight version 1.8.5.1353 Standard Edition. I always apply updates when they are reported.
Qt version 5.9.0.


Error info:
Popup error image is attached.

Windows Event Information:
Faulting application name: PixInsight.exe, version: 1.8.5.1353, time stamp: 0x598b2136
Faulting module name: Qt5Widgets.dll, version: 5.9.0.0, time stamp: 0x592fd931
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00000000000b2a1c
Faulting process id: 0x15a4
Faulting application start time: 0x01d34cee44e38539
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\PixInsight\bin\PixInsight.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\PixInsight\bin\Qt5Widgets.dll
Report Id: 05151be9-6dc2-493d-974b-2ae5cd1b7d40
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Offline Juan Conejero

  • PTeam Member
  • PixInsight Jedi Grand Master
  • ********
  • Posts: 7111
    • http://pixinsight.com/
Re: Random PixInsight crashes
« Reply #1 on: 2017 November 09 00:42:45 »
This problem cannot be reproduced on any of our working and testing machines, on any platform, including Windows 10, 8.1 and 7 SP1.

Try resetting all application settings to default values. On Windows, launch the application with the Ctrl key pressed, then accept the confirmation dialog. This should fix this issue under normal working conditions.

If this does not help, then my only advice is trying on a clean Windows installation. Utility applications distributed by some computer brands, notably Dell and HP, tend to cause problems. My advice is to perform a clean Windows 10 installation without any of these utilities. Version 1.8.5 of PixInsight is much more demanding of system resources than previous versions, especially regarding OpenGL implementations. Make sure you install the latest drivers available for your graphics hardware. Some graphics drivers are known to cause weird problems because of deficient OpenGL implementations. A notable example of this is the Intel HD Graphics driver on Windows 10.

Unfortunately, I cannot help you without more information, or a repeatable pattern that I can reproduce on our machines.
Juan Conejero
PixInsight Development Team
http://pixinsight.com/