Sudden instability and long start times on W10

misc17

Join Date 11/2016

Sudden instability and long start times on W10

Running Fences 3.09 on a Win 10.0.17763. Suddenly taking a very long time to get to a stable desktop from boot. Icons appear in fenced areas but Fences, titlebars, etc. don't appear for upwards of 5 minutes while the spinning circle spins. During use, desktop icons will disappear as the spinning circle appears. At some point the icons/fences will come back but this is killing my work day.

I downloaded the current installer, uninstalled, and reinstalled Fences. No difference.

Addendum: I also tried the purge/reinstall. No difference. I did have to click "Ignore" on some exes and dlls that wouldn't terminate: BsSndRpt64.exe and FencesMenu64.dll

Can confirm that it is Fences is destabilizing Windows. When uninstalled, I can get to a Desktop fairly fast and see my icons where Fences had them.

The last reinstall made my system so unstable that after considerable effort, I did a purge and am waiting to get any further tips.

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basj

Join Date 03/2001

+1687

Great, glad it worked for you.

Thank you,

Basj
Stardock Community Assistant.

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Quoting zedug,

reply 25

So for now I would guess that something happened to my previous fences configurations, and for some reason the purge batch file did not catch it...?

Fences purge does not remove \ alter snapshots so if there was an issue with one, it would be preserved.

My guess is that it was a folder portal that was causing your issue - in particular - if you had one pointing to a OneDrive folder that is sync'd.

Was that the case for you?

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

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no I did not have a folder portal (unless created unknowingly by accident)

also, once the problem was there, the hangs persisted far longer than it takes for onedrive to sync (I typically only sync a couple of files on a regular basis)

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Been using Fences for ages and no trouble. Today there is no 'move' button on any of my Fences, I am unable to create a new one. and the resize arrows have all vanished. I haven't tried the usual shut down and reboot yet.

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basj

Join Date 03/2001

+1687

Quoting MaggieM,

reply 29

Hello,
Sorry to hear you are having issues. Have try the lock/unlock fences option as show below?

Basj,
Stardock Community Assistant.

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No, I hadn't, but now I have. I only locked them a couple of days ago because they kept appearing on my main screen which is not where I wanted them so I moved them all across to the left hand screen and then locked them, which I'd never had reason to do before. I now have all my Fences just where I want them and in good working order - thank you very much, Basj. I'll try to remember in future not to lock them or, at least, remember what to do when they go 'funny' if I have locked them.
By the way, it's my 81st birthday today! I started life in Kent (England) in 1939 and had people trying to kill me for my first six years (WWII) and I never dreamt I'd end with something else nasty trying to kill me ! Not at all what I had planned for today! ;o)

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Happy birthday, Maggie.

Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager

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Happy Bday indeed Maggie

Just wanted to add that I found the root cause of my issue. One of the icons in a fence points to a file on a LAN drive, and said drive died, so the shortcut link was dead. I have to admit I did not think of it before - quite a severe consequence for a link that only got invoked very occasionally.

Simply removing that icon fixes the issue.

Hopefully this may help someone with the same issue in the future.

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basj

Join Date 03/2001

+1687

Happy belated birthday, Maggie. Sorry I missed your post. Great to know you got it working again.

Thank you and Stay Safe.

Basj
Stardock Community Assistant.

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basj

Join Date 03/2001

+1687

Thank you Zedug for reporting back. Glad you fix the issue.

Take care and Stay Safe..

Basj
Stardock Community Assistant.

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Hello, OP here. It's been a couple of months and I decided to reinstall Fences today to see what happens. At the moment it is stable and working as expected. There have been several patches and updates pushed to my computer by my employer's IT group in the interim. It could be that the issue causing the conflict with Fences got fixed in one of those updates. Of course the next update could break Fences again but at the moment I have no way to determine what caused the problem in the first place. For now, I am happy to have Fences back and will keep an eye on it.

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basj

Join Date 03/2001

+1687

Great, thanks for reporting back.

Thank you,

Basj
Stardock Community Assistant.

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Spoke too soon. After a day or so, graphics instabilities came back. First I would see black areas where a Fence used to be when I dragged it to a new position. Later, the desktop would become unstable again - with the mouse over a clear area, the spinning circle would appear and the rest of the desktop would be unresponsive. No way to click on desktop items, taskbar, etc.

Once more to the Purge.

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basj

Join Date 03/2001

+1687

Hello misc17,

Please try Cleanboot steps as mentioned here : https://forums.stardock.com/486084/fences-support-faq#cleanboot

Try it and report back.

Thank you,

Basj
Stardock Community Assistant.

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Basj,

I cannot create an Admin account, I don't have those privileges, and there's zero chance that my IT group will work with me on this.

I think this is beyond Stardock's control. Fences is a great tool but for $10 I think it is too much to ask for it to be tweaked for Enterprise environments where there's a lot of monitorware and where end users have no say in system configurations. At minimum there are known conflicts with Forcepoint and with Nvidia graphics. I have both so I'm doubly affected. Even if I get it running today, it could all go south tomorrow when something else gets pushed to the machine.

Not a great situation but it is reality.

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