Specific Platform Categories lock up after scrolling for a short time

[flighty]

As the title says- Launchbox (but not Bigbox) is almost entirely freezing after a short amount of scrolling through games in at least a couple platform categories. If I click a different category, Launchbox will stay frozen for about another minute before switching to it, and then everything suddenly runs normally unless I go back the the problem category and scroll again. I'm assuming something got corrupted within these categories, but I don't know what to look for.
Things I've tried while attempting to troubleshoot:

• Deleting my current theme, installing and using "Airy"
• Reinstalling overtop of my current installation
• Tools > Download > Update Metadata for All Games
• Removing all music, manuals, videos, and images from my entire library, then downloaded only Box Front images
• Deleting all music and manual file paths from game metadata from the problematic categories
• Removed all custom sort titles from my entire library
• Checking the log file to see what Launchbox is doing while it is freezing up. (It's possible there's something helpful there, but I'm not seeing anything suspicious)
• Switching between WMP and FFmpeg video playback. Yes, I removed all media, but the log suggested that Launchbox was still looking for media to play, so I tried this just in case.
• Batch-converted all of the Box Front images into .jpg no larger than 900 x 900
• Windows Settings > System > Storage > Temporary files > "Remove files"
• Admin Command Prompt "sfc /SCANNOW" and "DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth"
• Win + R > "msdt.exe -id DeviceDiagnostic"

What should my next steps be? This issue has been going on for months and I don't have a trustworthy data backup to attempt to restore without rolling back a very very long time, so I would like to try other solutions first, if anyone has any ideas other than starting completely fresh?

(None of this was at all helpful. See my reply below for more details about the issue.)

Edited yesterday at 07:21 AM by flighty
added more attempted troubleshooting steps and mention of my reply below.

[Jayinem]

Right click on Windows button in bottom left and choose Command Prompt (Admin)

type this in

sfc /SCANNOW

return

then when it's done type 

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

return

May or may not help, but it's something to try. If your Launchbox in on a different hdd than C then type cd E: or F: or whatever the drive letter is before doing these. 

If that doesn't help I would install a fresh Launchbox from Launchbox.com in a new location, then copy your data, themes, LBthemes folders and if you use music copy that folder same for videos from the current one to the new one so that you don't lose anything and see if that helps. In this case you're starting fresh yet keeping your data at the same time. 

Edited February 3 by Jayinem

[flighty]

I tried everything I could think of, gave up, downloaded and installed a fresh copy of Launchbox 13.25, and began re-importing my library. I got my roms and their metadata and box art imported, then a fair way into my Steam Library (many hours wasted at this point) when the new installation started locking up just like the previous version. There has been no crash, I have not added any plugins, I am doing nothing but entering missing metadata and images. This never happened on the older versions of Launchbox.

After more testing, there seems to be some wild inefficiency or leak going on. 
For context: Windows 11 Home 25H2, AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR5 RAM, Intel Arc B580 12GB GPU, and Launchbox is running off its own dedicated Samsung 1TB NVME drive.
Normal desktop usage (such using this forum, or browsing social media) will show between 0-3% CPU average usage, and 0-8% average GPU usage, 8% spikes being media-heavy doomscrolling. Here's a screenshot of what my Task Manager is showing after just seconds of scrolling my Launchbox library, up to where it locks up entirely (web browser closed, No music, no videos, only scrolling 2D box-fronts):

(The sharp drop-off from 100% is Launchbox freezing)

I've also noticed that Launchbox will freeze up much faster when scrolling up, even when scrolling very slowly, while it usually takes a while when scrolling down unless I'm scrolling very quickly.

Edited February 12 by flighty
more detail added and Task Manager Performance screenshot added

[flighty]

13.26 seems to have slightly improved performance, even making some previously troublesome platforms fairly safe to scroll, but the "All" category remains nearly unusable. This makes me wonder if Launchbox is trying to load a percentage of the list into VRAM or something- as in a much larger amount of media than is currently onscreen at any one time, and significantly more of a large list than a small one. I have no theories as to why scrolling up seems to accelerate the issue much faster than scrolling down.
 

Edited February 12 by flighty

[flighty]

Issue found!

• Options > Visuals > Boxes > Dynamic Box Sizing = true

When it's unchecked, the issue *rarely* happens, rather than literally every time, predictably. Scrolling up is still very hazardous in the "All" category, buy hey, I can actually use Launchbox again.

Edit:
I've since noticed that there is a noticeable additional increase in stability in the "All" category by drastically scaling down the image sizes with the magnification slider on the Button Bar (you can enable the Button Bar with Ctrl+Shift+B, if you currently have it hidden). This shrinks the box front images more than I would like, and causes Launchbox to re-cache all of these images again, and then yet again if I want to scale them back up when I'm done, but might be a crucial step to take if anyone else is dealing with even less stability than I have.

Edited yesterday at 07:36 AM by flighty

[AstroBob]

Hiya,

Thanks for the detailed report here and sorry the issues, but glad to hear the dynamic box sizing somewhat improves performance here. 

I wanted to chime in to flag that we're actually working on an update to the image grid behind the scenes to improve it's performance. We have a full writeup of the current image grid implementation and how we aim to improve it over on our feedback site, and linked below here: 

- https://feedback.launchbox.gg/p/improved-performance-mode-for-image-grid

We're hoping to put this into a beta in the near future, but if you'd like to try it out, feel free to upvote that post, that way you'll be notified once it's ready to test. It would be interesting to hear the impact that it has when viewing the `all` category, as it's specifically designed to be a more performant mode for these specific large views.

Cheers,

[DZL]

@flighty Have you had any issues with crashing/locking up in Big Box as well? I know this thread is about LB but just curious. Thanks for all the follow ups on this post!

[flighty]

@DZL Big Box actually doesn't have this issue at all, somehow! Even before I did anything to try to fix LB, BB scrolled flawlessly, so I was using it to sidestep the issue.

[DZL]

@flighty That’s good to hear. I’m on a high end commercial 4 player cabinet and BB crashes like no other from 13.23 through the betas currently to 13.26 for me…replacing the entire PC this week as I’m having system wide instability as well, likely processor or motherboard. 

[flighty]

@DZL Ouch. Well if the logs aren't showing any error messages, you might try running through some of the troubleshooting steps I listed, as they include basically every potential fix I could find related to inexplicable crashing during general use. Maybe save the more drastic ones like deleting all media or completely rebuilding from scratch for last, especially given they didn't even help in my case. Wishing you luck!

[DZL]

@flighty Definitely I will look through the error logs again & compare. Appreciate it. Luckily the replacement PC is coming this week & will go from there to see how stable things  are. I would leave doing a rebuild of the Launchbox/Big Box setup to the guys who did my build and drive as I didn’t do that myself & there’s a lot going on with plugins & configuration with 3 screens, controls, light guns, wheels pedals etc. They have been remoting in to help with issues as well & I think j it’s hopefully down to replacing the PC.