nvda settings randomly resetting #3165

nvaccessAuto · 2013-04-17T13:24:16Z

Reported by camlorn on 2013-04-17 13:24
This has happened twice in 3 days. Nvda will randomly forget all of my settings, including that nvda has been run on my computer before, re displaying the start up dialogs and resetting everything. Obviously, this is...problematic.
What do I need to do, besides (if I can) comment with how to reliably reproduce it?
The only changes in my setup since this has started happening are the enabling of the us-dvorak keyboard layout.
I'm on Version: master-9098,fb41602, and continually update as soon as new development snapshots come out. I first saw this on Monday the 15th.
The easiest fix would probably be making a backup of all settings at startup, of some sort. I'm not really sure why this is happening, but both times were while the system was being very sluggish--maybe some sort of interrupted file writing?
Blocked by #667

nvaccessAuto · 2013-04-17T19:52:33Z

Comment 1 by jteh on 2013-04-17 19:52
Do you have any NVDA add-ons installed?

nvaccessAuto · 2013-04-18T07:49:22Z

Comment 2 by briang1 on 2013-04-18 07:49
I assume that the older version does not do this even if reinstalled does it?

The last time I saw this effect it turned out to be the computer or in fact a program running on it that seemed to interfere with some files being written to.

However something like that should affect older versions of nvda equally as often as the newer ones I'd have thought.
Have you installed anything recently?

nvaccessAuto · 2013-04-19T20:54:53Z

Comment 3 by camlorn on 2013-04-19 20:54
The most recently installed program is Visual Studio 2012. The second most recently installed program is Skype. Both times, this happened shortly after a processor spike during which large parts of the system became unresponsive. Since it hasn't yet happened a third time, I'm going to go with it having something to do with not enough cpu for settings saving.
If I can reliably duplicate it, I'll comment; that said, it is probably worthwhile to at least do something to make the settings more resistant to this.
The only installed add-on is OCR.

nvaccessAuto · 2013-04-20T06:20:43Z

Comment 4 by briang1 on 2013-04-20 06:20
Sounds to me that its more likely to be a Windows process and I have noticed on XP since a recent Windows update, with nvda running something stops Explorer.exe from closing every time at shutdown. As you say, its not doing it to order, and I did wonder if it might be the malicious software removal tool or anti virus that is spiking the processor and then some software does not do as expected. I don't see how one can make a program resistant to this myself if this is indeed the case. Last time it happened they updated the malware scanning routines so it could not max out a processor. Just an idea.
Good ol Microsoft!

nvaccessAuto · 2013-04-21T17:27:20Z

Comment 5 by camlorn on 2013-04-21 17:27
I am running no Antivirus. Windows firewall is running, but that's it. I'm also windows 7.

nvaccessAuto · 2013-04-23T05:01:53Z

Comment 6 by jteh on 2013-04-23 05:01
The only way this could happen that i can think of is that NVDA was terminated while it was writing the configuration file. We could work around this in one of two ways:

Back up the old configuration before writing; or
Write the configuration to a temporary file and then move that file over the top of the configuration file.
The second option is probably easier, as it avoids the need to detect and restore a broken configuration.

nvaccessAuto · 2013-09-13T17:55:12Z

Comment 7 by PZajda on 2013-09-13 17:55
Hi,

I have done something which should fix this issue, I hop I understood the way to fix it correctly:

First, change the filename attribute of config.conf to nvda.ini.tmp;
Write the configuration to this file;
put the filename attribute to its original value;
Delete the old nvda.ini then replace it by the temporary file.

If the temporary config is not written correctly, the configuration shouldn't be change so not damaged too.
The worst case is if NVDA is stopped before the copy of the new file, it is still possible to rename nvda.ini.tmp to nvda.ini and get the configuration back. Maybe should it be done automatically when NVDA load the configuration?

It is available on git at:
https://bitbucket.org/pzajda/nvda.git
Branch: t3165

nvaccessAuto · 2013-09-13T21:06:05Z

Comment 8 by jteh on 2013-09-13 21:06
Thanks again for your work. Unfortunately, I meant to block this on #667 but forgot, as #667 completely changes the config code and it also writes profiles, so it may as well be done after that is merged. The idea is the same, though. We probably want to factor it out into a helper function so that it can also be used by inputCore when writing gestures.ini (#1532).

I sincerely apologise for having wasted some of your time on this.

bramd · 2016-04-27T01:19:38Z

I've seen this issue happen a few times recently on a fairly new laptop of a friend running Windows 10. It seems quite easy to implement this and I would be glad to do so.

derekriemer · 2016-04-27T01:28:08Z

Please produce steps to reproduce the

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On Apr 26, 2016, at 19:19, Bram Duvigneau notifications@github.com wrote:

I've seen this issue happen a few times recently on a fairly new laptop of a friend running Windows 10. It seems quite easy to implement this and I would be glad to do so.

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bramd · 2016-04-29T20:59:03Z

@derekriemer So far, I was unable to reproduce this reliably. It just sometimes happened after a shutdown/reboot of the computer.

Brian1Gaff · 2016-04-30T09:41:38Z

Are you sure that the computer is not trying to recover from an error, it
has at least once happened to meas it has restored to what it thought was a
last known good start up.
Brian

bglists@blueyonder.co.uk
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Please address personal email to:-
briang1@blueyonder.co.uk, putting 'Brian Gaff'
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Sent: Friday, April 29, 2016 9:59 PM
Subject: Re: [nvaccess/nvda] nvda settings randomly resetting (#3165)

@derekriemer So far, I was unable to reproduce this reliably. It just
sometimes happened after a shutdown/reboot of the computer.

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#3165 (comment)

…refs issue nvaccess#3165) Instead of directly writing the file, a temporary file is created and moved to the final location. This prevents corrupt configuration files being written. Added a fileUtils module with just a FaultTolerantFile context manager for now to facilitate this pattern. Please update miscDependencies submodule to a revision that includes the osmove module.

jcsteh · 2017-03-15T00:47:24Z

Making this a p1. While it doesn't cause a crash, the configuration getting corrupted and reset is very bad for the user when it happens and we've had quite a few reports of it now.

@feerrenrut, would you mind taking care of this? @bramd kindly provided a PR (#5916) to fix this, but unfortunately, I didn't notice he had addressed my review comments and now we've broken it with recent config system changes. I think much of the PR is still usable though. See also #3165 (comment) for background.

PratikP1 · 2017-03-15T05:06:41Z

Thank you. This would be a greatly welcomed fix. See my request in #6969 as well.

…refs issue #3165) Instead of directly writing the file, a temporary file is created and moved to the final location. This prevents corrupt configuration files being written. Added a fileUtils module with just a FaultTolerantFile context manager for now to facilitate this pattern. Please update miscDependencies submodule to a revision that includes the osmove module.

Re issue: #3165 Merge branch 'i3165-saferConfigSaving' into next

Fixes issue #3165 Save configuration profiles and gesture maps as an atomic operation Instead of directly writing the file, a temporary file is created and moved to the final location. This prevents corrupt configuration files being written. Added a `fileUtils` module with just a `FaultTolerantFile` context manager for now to facilitate this pattern.

- Deprecated code removed: - PR #6878: `speech.REASON_*` constants, `controlTypes.REASON_*` should be used instead. (issue #6846) - PR #6877: `i18nName` for synth settings, `displayName` and `displayNameWithAccelerator` should be used instead. (issues #6846, #5185) - PR #6876: `config.validateConfig`. (issues #6846, #667) - PR #6875: `config.save`. (issue #6846) - PR #6914: Support Windows Calculator on Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB (Long-Term Servicing Branch) and Server. (issue #6914) - PR #6987: Reduced the chance of configuration file being corrupted when Windows shuts down. Configuration files are now written to a temporary file before replacing the actual configuration file. (issue #3165)

nvaccessAuto added bug z goodForNewDev (archived) labels Nov 10, 2015

jcsteh mentioned this issue Jan 24, 2016

NVDA lose the settings a few times to start the windows #5709

Closed

bramd mentioned this issue Apr 30, 2016

Save configuration profiles and gesture maps as an atomic operation (… #5916

Closed

jcsteh mentioned this issue Mar 15, 2017

All settings in an individual profile deleted upon NVDA crash #6968

Closed

jcsteh added the p2 https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/blob/master/projectDocs/issues/triage.md#priority label Mar 15, 2017

feerrenrut self-assigned this Mar 15, 2017

feerrenrut mentioned this issue Mar 17, 2017

Safer config saving #6987

Merged

feerrenrut added a commit that referenced this issue Mar 17, 2017

Incubates #6987

d506e97

Re issue: #3165 Merge branch 'i3165-saferConfigSaving' into next

feerrenrut mentioned this issue Mar 17, 2017

Feature request: Provide a way to back up configurations #6969

Open

feerrenrut closed this as completed in #6987 Apr 4, 2017

nvaccessAuto added this to the 2017.2 milestone Apr 4, 2017

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nvda settings randomly resetting #3165

nvda settings randomly resetting #3165

nvaccessAuto commented Apr 17, 2013

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bramd commented Apr 27, 2016

derekriemer commented Apr 27, 2016

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jcsteh commented Mar 15, 2017

PratikP1 commented Mar 15, 2017 via email

nvda settings randomly resetting #3165

nvda settings randomly resetting #3165

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