Crashes or Freezes

Crash: OpenKneeboard’s window closes by itself, sometimes with an error message Freeze: OpenKneeboard still has a window, but it ignores keyboard, mouse, and other input. Windows might say “The application has stopped responding.”

Reporting crashes or freezes

Please do not report crashes or freezes if:

  • you are running OpenKneeboard as administrator, or “[Administrator]” is in the window title; there are known bugs in the Windows App SDK that can not be worked around until Microsoft fix them.
  • you have an XP-Pen tablet driver installed and the crash is when enabling WinTab
  • you have Gaomon tablet driver installed and the crash is when enabling WinTab
  • you have C:\Windows\System32\WinTab32.dll with that specific capitalization of WinTab and the crash is when enabling Wintab

If you have an unsupported tablet driver, you might want to try OpenTabletDriver instead.

**Please report crashes or freezes via GitHub issues, and attach a zip file containing a single relevant (recent) dump file.

  • WARNING: these files can contain some personal information, such as the name of your computer, your username (e.g. it may contain C:\Users\fred which says your username is fred) and the contents of your kneeboard
  • If the file is too large, use a service like Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive or similar.
  • If you would prefer to share it privately, still file an issue, but send a link to the dump file to openkneeboard-dumps@fred.fredemmott.com
  • If you are able to reliably reproduce the issue, please include steps with as much detail as you can, and any relevant files

Getting a dump file for a crash

If you are able to reproduce the issue or it repeats itself over time:

  1. Enable full dumps; this may create files > 200mb in size. Run %PROGRAMFILES%\OpenKneeboard\scripts\enable-full-dumps.reg
  2. Make OpenKneeboard crash or wait for it to crash
  3. There should be a .dmp file for OpenKneeboard in %LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps; if there are multiple, sort by date, and use the most recent one

If the files are too large, you can try %PROGRAMFILES%\OpenKneeboard\scripts\enable-mini-dumps.reg: this will create much smaller files, but they are much less likely to be useful for diagnosing the problem. They are however much better than no dump if sharing 200mb+ files is not practical for you.

If the crash happened once and you’re unable to repeat it:

  • check for a recent .dmp file in Saved Games\OpenKneeboard; make sure the time lines up with the crash, then use that
  • if there isn’t one there, check %LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps; depending on your Windows settings and other software, there may be a dmp there even without running either of the previous .reg files

Getting a dump file for a freeze

  1. Open Task Manager from Ctrl+Alt+Delete
  2. Find “OpenKneeboardApp”
  3. Right click on it
  4. Select “Create dump file” from the right-click menu
  5. Task Manager will then show a window telling you where it saved the dump

Crashes on startup, or no window visible

When you start OpenKneeboard, you should see a window like this:

A normal Windows app

If you do not, OpenKneeboard is crashing on startup.

Corrupt settings

Try renaming Saved Games\OpenKneeboard to anything else; this will remove your OpenKneeboard settings.

If that fixes the issue, please report the crash, and also attach or send a copy of the original OpenKneeboard saved games folder