Pro/E sometimes unresponsive after info, help or browser panel activity

[egifford]

Ever since going to Wildfire 3 we've been experiencing sporadic issues with Pro/E locking up / becoming unresponsive whenever the help functionality orinfo functions (Info - Model, Info - Feature, Info - BOM, Info - Audit Trail) are accessed in Pro/E. Recently it seems to have become much more frequent and is now effecting use of our internal Pro/E help web page on the browser panel(going from a topic back to the home page - Pro sometimeslocks up). I checked for similar posting and found older posts with similar issues but no resolution. It does not appear to be related to a specific cut ofWildfire 3, aspecific versionof IE or hardware configuration. That and it's not consistent / repeatable. Anyone encounter this and have a fix? How about a browser other than IE (these functions are all using browser functionality)? Several posts indicate IE is the only browser PTC supports.

Pro/E Widlfire 3 m230, Intralink 3.4 M030

Dell Precision workstations (380 to T3400) with certified Nvidia graphics cards, 2-4 GB RAM

Windows XP Pro 32 bit,SP3

Mix of Internet Explorer 7 and 8

Thanks,

Erik

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[jamesavisengine]

While I havenÂ’t seen this issue, I can confirm that until Wildfire 5 you can only use IE in ProE. In Wildfire 5 you have the option of using SeaMonkey (by setting config option windows_browser_type mozilla_based_browser), though I donÂ’t know why you would want to since it's not certified for use with Windchill servers on any system other than AIX. Why, when you have a choice between Firefox (which is certified after version 3.5 for Windows) and SeaMonkey (which isn't), they chose SeaMonkey, I'll never understand.

[vmcdaniel]

Wehad this with Wildfire 3.0 as well.We found that a full reinstall took care of the issue.

We were installing on clients with a copy-over from the server install and am cusious if that was the cause.

Do you install to clients by coping the files over? Or by running setup.exe

[egifford]

Vaughn,

New PCs are set up with a copy of the installand we run through ptcsetup. Existing PCs get updates pushed over the network. What you indicated is one thing PTC suggested whenthey responded to my service request yesterday. I'm going to try an uninstall and clean install from disc on my working PC and test PC to see if it makes an improvement.

PTC also suggested checking which video driver we're using and setting the Global 3D graphics setting in the Nvidia control panel to the preset for Pro/Engineer. Unfortunately, changing the Global 3D setting to "Pro/E" caused the Intralink 3.4 client to frequently crash when using the "information" function - PTC recomended changing it back to Default to address that issue. Other things PTC suggested were installing Pro/E as the local user with temporary admin privelages, checking virus scanning and firewall applications to ensure they are not blocking a necessary .dll file and ensuring there wasn't corruption in the user's profile.

A couple of replies have suggested checking that the user's working directory (where info function files are typically written)is local to avoid network latency as an issue and changing the Windows Performance setting from "let windows choose..." to "adjust for best performance".

I'm going to try a few of these suggestions. I'll post back with a summary.

Thanks to everyone for their replies.

Erik

[egifford]

Thought I'd post back regarding what I've tried and the results.

Did a full uninstall and installed fresh from CDs - no change, still locks up.

Tried altering the Windows Performance setting to "best performance" - no improvements in Pro/E

Tried going to the latest Nvidia driver and to the "PTC certified" version - no change.

Tried setting the graphics card to specifically use the Pro/E presets for Pro/E specifically (under Program Settings instead of globally applying them) - no change

I suppose I could try setting the Nvidia "Global Settings" to Pro/E to see if it fixes the behavior in Pro and deal with the fact that it causes Intralink's info function to freeze

[ptc-46674]

We have experienced this issue with internet explore 8.0

8.0 is not supported with Intralink 9.0 until some later date code ? are you using some windchill based data management "Intralink, PDMLink, Windchill" ?

the answer for us was to uninstall internet explorer 8.0 and go back to the latest version of 7.0

Dave McClinton

Sr. Mechanical designer / MCAD System Admininistrator

McKesson Automation

724 741 7760

[davehaigh]

One other thing you might look at is:
dm_cache_limit in the config.pro.

dm_cache_limit sets a size limit for the local cache if the user's cache approaches this limit it can cause
problems. Could be cause for ProE non-responsive problems.

Your best off setting this value to 0. That way it can grow to any size it needs to. However a huge cache can cause it own problems.

David Haigh
Phone: 925-424-3931
Fax: 925-423-7496
Lawrence Livermore National Lab
7000 East Ave, L-362
Livermore, CA 94550

[egifford]

After resolving the strange issue I outlined in this post (http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/fo/st/thread=45290), the unresponsive browser issue I had outlined in this thread is now corrected. I have yet to determine exactly what in our internal Pro/E help web page is causing the problem, but having Pro/E's web_browser_homepage set to not default to anything appers to fix a multitude of problems. Our help page is a very simple html file listing hints and tips in text format, links to procedures and policy, etc - nothing fancy. I'll have to rebuild the web page and point just my PC toitto see at what point Pro/E starts to exhibit the issue again. Anyway, just something to check if you have a custom web page set as Pro/E's browser homepage and start to experience issues that you can't explain or get rid of with something that seems logical.

Erik