Jason Carr

I've put this on the list for the next community poll.

What version were you running before upgrading to 11.2?

Alright, just tested with your data, and I didn't have any issues on startup. So this means that either it's an issue with reading or writing to the drive, or it's possible that there's hidden files in that folder that aren't being zipped up and aren't showing (though that would be strange). Here's instructions on how to show hidden files: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028316/windows-view-hidden-files-and-folders-in-windows-10

Looking at the code, it doesn't look like that's possible, unless somehow the Settings.xml file still exists but is hidden. So that's strange. If you can zip up and PM me your LaunchBox\Data folder, I can look to see what might be actually happening.

How long are you waiting for the initializing extraction process? It can take a while after the ThirdParty folders are deleted. Beyond that, it might be worth running chkdsk on the drive to make sure that there's no file system corruption or anything of that nature. The Logs folder is only populated if debug logging is turned on. Debug logging would help in this case, but it can't easily be turned on without being able to start the app. Still, if you have 11.1 working, then perhaps you could turn on debug logging under Tools > Options > Debugging and that will give us a bit more information.

Using Dropbox or Google Drive or OneDrive or any other file syncing service? Are the files in one of those?

Most likely, it's having trouble updating the library folders. Try deleting the LaunchBox\ThirdParty\CefSharp and LaunchBox\ThirdParty\VLC folders. They should be recreated on startup (but for some reason something is probably interfering with the deletion process).

Just for anyone who happens to stumble on this thread, it should be fixed in 11.2-beta-1. Details here:

11.2-beta-1 is out now with a hopeful fix for the issues that @Xirvet and @sialivi were having with Clean Up Media. As it turns out, it was not MalwareBytes, but rather the differences in number formatting between the US and other countries. Countries/systems that use a comma instead of a decimal point were the culprit. Hopefully this beta fixes it, and then I can put out another official release.

Okay, well that throws a wrench in the mix...

Wow, okay. I have reports of this happening to both @Xirvet and @sialivi, both of whom have been very helpful in figuring this issue out, and I really appreciate it. It turns out that both users are running MalwareBytes, which is (yet again) throwing false positives and murdering a bunch of processes during the image scanning operations, which is causing this issue. My apologies to you both and anyone else who might run into this. I will have to tweak the code to handle this situation more gracefully. There's really nothing I can do to prevent MalwareBytes from ruining things, but I can stop the process at that point and tell the user not to continue, now that I know what's going on.

Gotcha, thanks. By chance, are you running any anti-virus or anti-malware software other than Windows Defender?

Thanks. Do you happen to recall about how long the process took? Was it quick (less than 10 minutes), or did it take a long time?

By chance, do you remember if the items that showed up in the list to delete said that they were "not in use" or "duplicates"?

Thanks, will test with it. I deleted the data file for security reasons after downloading it.

@Xirvet Very sorry to hear. I'm currently trying to reproduce this so that I can get it fixed, but I haven't been able to reproduce it yet. Would you be willing to zip up and PM me your LaunchBox\Data folder so that I can test with it? Edit: Also, do you remember which boxes you checked when you ran the clean up media process?

Yikes, very sorry to hear @sialivi. I'm currently trying to reproduce this so that I can get it fixed. So far I haven't been able to reproduce it though. Would you be willing zip up your LaunchBox\Data folder and PM it to me so that I can test with it?

No worries at all; we do appreciate the report.

@Axenn To be honest I haven't tested much, but I'm pretty sure I know what's going on. You've got copies of your platform data files in your LaunchBox\Data\Platforms folder. Unfortunately you can't copy these files and leave them in the data folders without causing major issues (such as duplication). If you want to copy/back up these files, you'll need to copy them somewhere outside of your LaunchBox\Data folder.

Okay, can you zip up and PM me your LaunchBox\Data folder @Axenn? That should help us get this nailed down.

@Axenn Thanks for the report. I'm not sure what's happening really, because I can't reproduce any duplication with custom fields or additional apps. We did just put out the official 11.1 release. I didn't see this issue with the official 11.0 release either though. First off, are you able to reproduce any further duplication with the 11.1 release? If so, can you provide us with steps to reproduce?

Yeah, sorry if I came off as a bit defensive. Generally, LaunchBox tries to avoid using the same images for several different games, but it does happen on occasion. What it should be doing in that case is renaming images with the game's GUID ID at the end in that case, so that they don't end up being used for multiple games at once (that's how the system was initially designed). There are situations though when that doesn't occur. Unfortunately though I have a feeling that if we changed this, we'd get complaints the opposite way. "Why did my images disappear when I renamed this game?" So I feel like, instead of fixing that particular issue, we should probably just ensure that images are not used for multiple games in the first place. Edit: But of course we can never prevent the issue when external tools or other frontends are used to create images, or when a user manually places an image in the folder. This issue is really a doosy, which is why we haven't focused much time on it. Thankfully it is a relatively rare occurrence for most users.

I am aware of this issue, but I was aware of it ages ago. Unless I'm misunderstanding, this did occur in 10.15, and has honestly been an issue for a very long time. I don't consider to be a very serious issue though.

Just put the 11.1 release out; we need to get it out ASAP because of some of the other issues. Depending on feedback, we may still re-visit the single video for multiple games issue, but as for right now, we need to get the release out. The Options screen saves whether anything was changed or not, which could probably be improved, but it's not much of an issue (also always did). I haven't seen that not populating issue, but sometimes it does take a while longer to populate.