Errors after restart with Ver. 5.2.16.1

[George Langford]

Helicon Focus has been working quite well for me in processing multiple images made with a digital single lens reflex camera (Olympus E-volt) and stereo microscope or metallograph.

Recently I have been processing large numbers of images of a single field - forty-nine, 8 megapixel images as the extreme example. Today I processed over a thousand such images, twenty-eight such fields, to be exact. After I finished without incident, I closed Helicon Focus and restarted the Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop. The restart was uneventful, but when I opened Helicon Focus again, I got the following error message: "Access violation at address 7C910A19 in module ntdll.dll read of address CACCAC02." I cancelled the error message and tried starting Helicon Focus again, whereupon another error message appeared: "Internal error ! out of memory."

This sort of thing has happened before with this version of Helicon Focus over the last few days. Each time I uninstall Helicon Focus, reinstall an earlier version (approximately February 2010) and then download the latest version from the Helicon Focus menu. That gets Helicon Focus working again, but it's far too tedious to do this on a routine basis.

Sometimes the error message blames HeliconFocus.exe; other times, it's ntdll.dll again.

Processing fewer images seems not to be so troublesome; I never encountered errors while processing images from the stereo microscope, where I use a dial indicator to space the imaging distances uniformly. With the metallograph and a 21X objective and taking pictures of the polished and etched surface of a piece of stainless steel tube that's fifteen feet long and not aligned well with the microscope axis, I have a lot more images, each one one micron (0.001 mm) apart from the next, using the fine focus graduations. The end results are great, not just with the sharpened image, but also with the animated image and the stereo images. But Helicon Focus eventually freezes and has to be uninstalled and reinstalled as described above.

Thanks,
George Langford

[Stas Yatsenko]

George,

We would be very interested to locate and fix this bug. We will send you a debug version to locate the problem.

[George Langford]

Hello Stas -

Thanks for sending the link to your beta version. I installed it per instructions and ran the last set of images described above, with virtually identical results. One bug report got sent after it finished the first stage, i.e., making the sharp image from the stack. I then closed HeliconFocus and tried to restart it. Several more emails were sent by the bug reporter, and I could not run another set of images. I have not yet reinstalled heliconFocus.exe, as I have to get to work. So far, so good.

However, after what I thought would be the last bug report, and when I attempted to close the program, it got into a loop wherein it attempted to send one more bug report and got hung up, so that it would start the same bug send each time I tried to exit. I finally killed HeliconFocus.exe with the Contr+Alt+Del function of Explorer.

BTW, I am running Windows XP.

Best regards,
George

[Stas Yatsenko]

Thanks for testing, George. We will analyze your reports and will prepare fixed version for you.

[George Langford]

Hello Stas -

I retreated to an earlier version of HeliconFocus and got my immediate project back on track, so I'm now eagerly awaiting the debugged Beta version ...

Thanks & best regards,
George Langford

[Stas Yatsenko]

We will send you newer version via email.

[George Langford]

Hello Stas -

A little better ...

The new version ran a couple of stacks without incident, so I shut it down and restarted. It then ran another set of images OK.

When I restarted for a second time, my troubles began. HF froze and then exited. Upon trying again, the freeze repeated, but I had to use Contr+Alt+Del to take HF down.

Upon further restarts, similar things happened, and then it started to try to send error reports; it froze on the first try; subsequently, HF would spontaneously restart and try to send an error report. HF did that several times, as though caught in a loop. I stopped that by using Contr+Alt+Del again. So I'm back here for another debug session.

BTW, HF seems quite fast now in its processing. There are no image artifacts, but the HF logo doesn't appear anymore upon starting HF.

Best regards,
George

[George Langford]

Re: Errors after restart with Ver. 5.2.16.1

Hello Stas - regarding "A little better ..."

I'm getting set to run a bunch more sets of stacks - any estimated time for an updated repair ?

Thanks,
George Langford

[Stas Yatsenko]

The progress with this bug is slow because we cannot reproduce it in our environment and the only source of new information is your testing. I would recommend you to install old and new version into different folders to be able to use them both.

[George Langford]

Hello Stas -

Success ! I received Ver. 5.2.17.6 Beta this morning and tried it. I ran two stacks without incident; then I removed all the source & output files, then exited Helicon Focus, reopened it, and ran another stack. Still no incident. The debug window opens each time I run a stack; on the initial run, it records the brightness calculations, and then there's no more entries. Same thing happens on subsequent runs. The calculations all proceed quickly and without hesitation.

Thank you for taking the time to address this issue.

Best regards,
George Langford

[Stas Yatsenko]

Thanks for helping us to locate this bug!