Recently I bought a larger external hard drive, and I decided to start fresh with some new archives. Unfortunately, I'm unable to do much, because QRecallHelper, and sometimes QRecall itself, keeps crashing.

A backup of my Eudora Mail folder worked fine. It's about 275 MB in size, and I've continued to recapture it every hour for a week without any probems.

When I try to archive my entire home folder, however, which is about 16 GB in size, it proceeds only so far (varies between about 2 GB and 6 GB) before I get a message that QRecall has lost connection with the process. Checking the logs shows that QRecallHelper has crashed.

I can open the archive it was working on, but a repair is required first. If I try to add additional files to the archive after that, QRecallHelper crashes again within a few seconds to a few minutes.

Any idea what the problem is? Anything I can do to help you track it down? I'm attaching the log files.

-- Bruce

Ack! I intended to post this in the Bugs forum, but I guess this one is appropriate as well. Also, it seems to have lost the attachments when I did a preview. Let's try this again...

-- Bruce

Bruce Giles wrote:When I try to archive my entire home folder, however, which is about 16 GB in size, it proceeds only so far (varies between about 2 GB and 6 GB) before I get a message that QRecall has lost connection with the process. Checking the logs shows that QRecallHelper has crashed.

This problem is due to a bug in Mac OS X 10.4. I am working with Apple to develop a workaround, but there isn't one yet.

The problem is with Apple's Launch Services system. This is the part of the OS that identifies objects on a file system. Given a file or folder, it will tell you what kind of item it is, what its localized display name is, what applications will open it, what icon it should have, and so on.

QRecall uses this facility to capture the icon of every file. However, if one calls Launch Services to obtain the icon of a bundle and that bundle is in a folder which has never been opened in the Finder, occasionally that call will crash:

Thread 1 Crashed:

0   ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore 	0x90b9e3fc CSStoreGetUnit + 56

1   com.apple.LaunchServices       	0x9193ed00 CSStringCopyCFString + 108

2   com.apple.LaunchServices       	0x9194fe90 _LSCopyBindingInfoForItemRefInfo + 1336

3   com.apple.HIServices           	0x91848fc0 ISBuildBaseImage() + 1480

4   com.apple.HIServices           	0x91848880 GetImageForFSItem + 528

5   com.apple.HIServices           	0x91848544 GetIconRefFromFileInfo + 568

The solution is annoying, but simple: Open the folder containing the offending item in the Finder. When the Finder displays an item for the first time it does something to update the local .DS_Store file and the Launch Services database which permanently fixes the problem for that item.

For example, when I install a fresh OS I find I must open up the Applications and Utilities folder once to display all of the applications it contains. Once I do that, QRecall can capture the /Applications folder without any problem.

If you find it difficult to locate which item(s) is having problems, create a test archive and manually capture folders one at a time until you find the one that crashes.

As for why your QRecall application is crashing, I'll have to investigate that. The crash appears to be associated with a window. Does it crash when you open a specific kind of window (like the log or actions window) or when you open a specific archive?

James Bucanek wrote:The solution is annoying, but simple: Open the folder containing the offending item in the Finder. When the Finder displays an item for the first time it does something to update the local .DS_Store file and the Launch Services database which permanently fixes the problem for that item.

For example, when I install a fresh OS I find I must open up the Applications and Utilities folder once to display all of the applications it contains. Once I do that, QRecall can capture the /Applications folder without any problem.

Ah HA! That explains something else. The first couple of times this happened (prior to the logs I sent), it seemed to happen in exactly the same place. I got curious and started opening folders in the area where the capture stopped, looking to see if I could see anything amiss. I didn't, tried another capture, and the next capture got much further in the process before the capture stopped. Now I know why.

James Bucanek wrote:If you find it difficult to locate which item(s) is having problems, create a test archive and manually capture folders one at a time until you find the one that crashes.

Hmmm... This could be quite a job. I seem to have a number of such folders. Do I understand correctly that this only happens with folders containing applications? I wonder if I could create an AppleScript, or perhaps an Automator action, that would search the hard drive for folders containing Applications, then open and close those folders?

Normally, I do keep my "working" applications in the main /Applications folder (or its subfolders), but I do know that one of the folders where this happened was a folder containing an app I had created in REALbasic, which I probably never opened in the Finder, and another contained an app I had downloaded and unzipped, but the folder was still on my desktop, unopened.

James Bucanek wrote:As for why your QRecall application is crashing, I'll have to investigate that. The crash appears to be associated with a window. Does it crash when you open a specific kind of window (like the log or actions window) or when you open a specific archive?

To be honest, I don't know. I didn't actually realize I had had any QRecall application crashes lately, until I found the crash logs. Since I'm away from home so much lately, I tend to start a backup and then leave, and it might be a day or two later before I get back to the computer to see what happened. I don't recall any system dialogs informing me of an application crash, but I've noticed I don't always get those. I'll try to keep a closer eye on that.

-- Bruce

*sigh* Obviously, I have yet to figure out how this forum software works. I have no idea why all the HTML tags appeared in the above reply. It previewed just fine.

-- Bruce

Bruce Giles wrote:Do I understand correctly that this only happens with folders containing applications?

To be honest, I'm not sure. I've only encountered this problems with applications, but I suspect that it might be related to bundles/packages in general. Again, I haven't been able to get a definitive reason from Apple as to why this is happening so I can't say for sure.

James Bucanek wrote:

Bruce Giles wrote:Do I understand correctly that this only happens with folders containing applications?

To be honest, I'm not sure. I've only encountered this problems with applications, but I suspect that it might be related to bundles/packages in general. Again, I haven't been able to get a definitive reason from Apple as to why this is happening so I can't say for sure.

If I get some time later this weekend, I'll give it a shot and let you know what happens.

The latest release resolves this problem.