The mysterious error
OK, I’ve had my fill of weird things happen to Pai before. Many can be tracked down and fixed without too much issue. Some are just hose the whole system to the point that even a repair install doesn’t fix it. But few are the errors that make no sense. Errors with no apparent cause. Errors that seem to follow certain actions that can’t cause the kind of fallout that seems to be happening. Over the past week I’ve had two such errors.
First is the one that seems to be fixed. For whatever reason, if I left a window in the background too long, it would become unresponsive and crash the program it was from. After a huge driver purge and a trip to System Restore, I managed to solve it. I assume that my ATI driver install somehow had become messed up. I don’t really know because rolling back driver versions didn’t solve anything. The thing that solved the problem was the System Restore point, which didn’t change the driver version from the one I was at when everything went south.
The second problem seemed to be a return of the first problem, but then I found it to be only happening under certain circumstances: if any program outputted sound, after a bit (30 seconds or so), the program’s interface would lock, but the audio would keep going. I could not find the cause, no matter what I tried. And somehow my System Restore points were broken because any past that morning’s wouldn’t work, and that point didn’t solve the problem. Somehow the issue wasn’t affecting my Admin account, so I figured I could just rebuild my main account and that should fix it. An hour later after restoring some backup files and I had things working again. Until today. The same error, this time I knew the exact time it showed up. Only problem is, what I was doing at the time seemed to be pretty mundane: I was tagging some mp3s in Foobar. I’d been playing music all morning when suddenly the problem came back. So, somehow whatever I was doing in Foobar affected the entire system. I couldn’t figure it out, and System Restore once again got things back to normalcy.
Moral here? Complex problems can be hard to solve and just starting over can save you more time than unraveling things.
First is the one that seems to be fixed. For whatever reason, if I left a window in the background too long, it would become unresponsive and crash the program it was from. After a huge driver purge and a trip to System Restore, I managed to solve it. I assume that my ATI driver install somehow had become messed up. I don’t really know because rolling back driver versions didn’t solve anything. The thing that solved the problem was the System Restore point, which didn’t change the driver version from the one I was at when everything went south.
The second problem seemed to be a return of the first problem, but then I found it to be only happening under certain circumstances: if any program outputted sound, after a bit (30 seconds or so), the program’s interface would lock, but the audio would keep going. I could not find the cause, no matter what I tried. And somehow my System Restore points were broken because any past that morning’s wouldn’t work, and that point didn’t solve the problem. Somehow the issue wasn’t affecting my Admin account, so I figured I could just rebuild my main account and that should fix it. An hour later after restoring some backup files and I had things working again. Until today. The same error, this time I knew the exact time it showed up. Only problem is, what I was doing at the time seemed to be pretty mundane: I was tagging some mp3s in Foobar. I’d been playing music all morning when suddenly the problem came back. So, somehow whatever I was doing in Foobar affected the entire system. I couldn’t figure it out, and System Restore once again got things back to normalcy.
Moral here? Complex problems can be hard to solve and just starting over can save you more time than unraveling things.