I have been having strange problems with the latest official portable versions of OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird being used on the hard drive of a Vista PC and seeing the same problems on a Windows 7 PC. Incidentally, when I started using these Portable Apps about 5 years ago there was never a problem. I almost never use LibreOffice since it downgraded OOo's navigator in Write, but I've seen the problem on LibreOffice as well.
Periodically, any of those programs just freeze for no reason. The top bar says "not responding" and, if clicked on, the windows have a faded white overlay.
On Vista this almost never happened with Thunderbird. On Windows 7 it happens 10x more on Thunderbird. Is there something in common with these programs that could make this happen? Also on Win7 the Portable Apps menu takes about 15 seconds to load, which seems very slow. Is there anything that corrects these problems? Flash? Java? Some kind of setting I'm not aware of?
Thank you. I love Portable Apps and want them to work!
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This is nearly always drive or antivirus related. Everytime an app is not responding, that means it's trying to read/write from the drive it is run from but unable to. It could be that the drive is dying. It could have physical or logical errors. There could be something else reading/writing to the drive a lot and slowing everything else down (downloading torrents, copying large files, etc). Or it could be antivirus slowing reads/writes down.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thank you for answering. There is no torrent, no major file movement, the drive appears to be good, virus scans say things are good. Is there a standardized way to find out what is causing the problem?
Literally the only reason I've ever seen this behavior on Vista and up is when either there is an I/O issue or the CPU is hung up with something else.
To eliminate a drive issue, copy the apps locally and run them there. If they run fine, it's a drive issue. Try them on another PC as well. If they work fine there, it's something to do with the PC itself.
There's no reason for the apps themselves to suddenly have these issues, especially all these different apps that don't share any code. So, the root cause lies elsewhere, likely in one of the possibilities I outlined.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I'm not much of an expert when it comes to troubleshooting this sort of thing. It does NOT work locally on the Vista or Windows 7 box from before. It works perfectly on two other Windows 7 boxes and in some XP virtual machines. CHKDSK says the drives are perfect.
I am totally lost as to find out how the antivirus might cause this problem, or even what an "I/O issue" is, let alone how to solve it for the portable apps. I really do want these apps to work though. Are there suggested key words that I would be trying to look up?
It doesn't work if you copy it locally to the local hard drive (say to Documents or Desktop)? As in doesn't run at all? If not, something bigger is up with that machine. If it's corporate, it could be locked down. If it's personal, you should do a full check for viruses, malware, etc as well as a full check of the hardware.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
By "doesn't work" I meant "doesn't work right," in the sense that Thunderbird freezes frequently. The win7 box with the problem runs OOo and Firefox much better than the Vista, but Vista almost never had TB problems. They are in the User directory. The Vista always had hardware and virus scans that repeatedly passed with flying colors. Win7 is brand new and had one good scan to say it is in perfect running order. Vista has Norton Security, Win7 has McAfee. They are both private machines.