Hi,
I've done the usual searches but can't come up with anything, so wonder if anyone here can shed some light on this.
I've recently had an issue with CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X5 running on a laptop. On starting any of the components e.g. Coreldraw, the program hangs for anything up to three minutes then runs as normal until the first major operation (e.g. adding guidelines, grouping objects, etc), then it'll hang again for several minutes, after that, program runs fine until restarted, then it's a repeat of the same behaviour. Invoking Photopaint from within Coreldraw leads to a similar hang for anything up to four minutes.
After a bit of digging, I've found that at the points where it hangs Coreldraw is attempting to talk to a remote IP number (some xx-yy-zz-aa-deploy.akamaitechnologies type IP address - haven't a note of it here as laptop is at work). It eventually gives up, after something like 30 attempts, and the program then runs as normal.
Now, this laptop *used* to spend most of its life networked, however, as of Christmas, it's now fully 'stand-alone' for security reasons (as the laptop is running XP, company IT policy now forbids connection to the corporate LAN). I'm assuming that X5 somehow still thinks the laptop has network access for some reason I can't fathom, so, can someone point me in the direction of what is going on here, and what I have to change to stop this behaviour? (Please, please tell me it doesn't require a reinstall sans network!).
I've had this problem on and off for several months, in the past it was an occasional minor irritation, but since the laptop has been disconnected permanently from the network this behaviour has become a constant major pain..I'm now going on the assumption that the times in the past I've had these issues when the laptop was networked were when it couldn't get through to this akami server for whatever reasons.
I know X5 is long in the tooth now, we're upgrading from a bunch of individual X5 and X6 copies to volume licensed X7 sometime in the next month, but this laptop *has* to run XP as it now runs one of our older laser engravers (XP drivers only), our impending X7 upgrade (for better or worse) won't help me here, the X5 install will have to stay on it.
The IP number that the software is trying to talk to is definitely one assigned to akami, this laptop only ever talks to a Centronics/parallel interface laser engraver. As it's no longer networked, the laptop has defaulted to using a 169.x.y.z address. The Protexis anti-piracy software could be the culprit, I'll admit that it hadn't occurred to me to check for anything like that running, and it sort of makes sense considering the system was networked and the software activated online. I'll try killing the psi_service file as you suggest and see what happens, a quick search indicates that I can also disable the Protexis service and with some judicious renaming get the software to check a local dll file for copy protection rather than it polling a running service. I quite understand why they might want to try track legitimate/pirate installs, but if it is the Protexis service causing the issues, I wish they'd provided some sort of visible warning somewhere that this is going on, rather than just letting the software silently hang whilst timing out on a now non-existent network connection..surely there are other people out there running the software on non-networked machines? Will have a look at the Protexis service sometime tomorrow, and report back . Thanks for pointing me in that direction.
Update: 20 Jan 15
Had a look at this, it doesn't look as if the psi_service is causing the issue. I connected the laptop to an old wireless router at work to do a bit of debugging (no LAN connection-totally standalone). If I fire up Coreldraw, it's that binary itself which tries talking directly to the internet.
The first thing it tries to do on startup is look up some (as yet, unidentified) network address, it first tries using the IP number of the DNS server of the wireless box, *then* tries one of the Google DNS servers (8.8.8.8.) - this IP number must be 'hard coded' somewhere, as I've never used Google's DNS for anything. This appears to be the cause of the first 'hang'..no DNS servers to respond, so eventually (minutes later) the program gives up trying to look up whatever, and carries on as per normal.
The second 'hang' is the more interesting one, similar attempted DNS traffic plus an attempted UDP connection to 92.122.123.9 (a92-122-123-9.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com) on port 4670, now, as there isn't a valid working DNS, it can't be looking for this by name, this has to be another IP number that is 'hard coded' somewhere.
Will install a firewall and packet sniffer on the laptop today, and have another look at what is going on.
tannasg said:now, as there isn't a valid working DNS, it can't be looking for this by name
Maybe that's a good clue -- the hang may be in trying to do a DNS lookup, Windows has a bad habit of locking out other tasks if a network operation does not respond and its probably not something that the running programs can do anything about.
I'm not sure if this will help or hinder, but its worth trying.
Open the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file in a text editor and at the end of the file, add this at the beginning of a new line:
127.0.0.1 a92-122-123-9.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com
If this works, it will redirect the akamai request to the localhost address without needing a DNS lookup, and localhost should quickly respond that it does not provide the requested service rather than waiting for a timeout. But remember to remove the line again if it does not fix the problem and also bear in mind that being unable to contact akamai may mean that a feature (hopefully only an updates check, but could be something else) will not work.