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.”

These steps only apply for OpenKneeboard crashes; if the game crashes but OpenKneeboard doesn’t, a dump or crash file from the game is useful instead. Either way, please include OpenKneeboard logs when reporting all issues.

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 the dump privately, a GitHub issue is still required, but you can send a link to the dump file to openkneeboard-dumps@fred.fredemmott.com; if you send an email, mention it in your GitHub issue, or it will not be seen
  • If you are able to reliably reproduce the issue, please include steps with as much detail as you can, and any relevant files
  • WARNING: If you send an email without also filing a GitHub issue, it is very likely that your email will be automatically deleted before it is seen**

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