Last week, oddly enough, the system - XP-pro - did fine, and I got huge amounts of work done on the new master product catalog. Come yesterday, and I'm back to a crawl. DRAW X3 is taking 4 minutes to load, with no other user Apps running. I don't see how the problem could be the overloaded View Manager, which various people here suggested as the source, as there is no file involved. When I do load a file, I notice that some pages do just fine now with Copy and Paste, while with others it can take half a minute to Copy/Paste a single word. The Catalog is formatted as a series of two page spreads, with standardized headings, etc. and typically several product photos of moderate size, standardized text blocks with bullets, diagrams and specification charts. If I have 6 or so such spreads open, I can go to one and see no major slowdown, while the next one is sluggish to absurdity, with nothing I can isolate as a different element..I'm not supposed to be downloading anything, which pretty much stops me cold as far as using one of the View cleaners. But, rather than bend company policy, management has limited options, one of which would be to buy a more recent version of DRAW. I recall someone writing to the effect that one of the later versions was able to delete all View Manager data, which might or might not solve the problem. So, can anyone tell me which version started offering that capability? Are there similar problems of huge slowdowns with later versions of DRAW, as well?
Hello Phil; Do a search for %TEMP%, and select all of the temp files. ( Windows will NOT let you delete anything that is being usde, So it's best to do that after a fresh reboot.) Clean out the "Spy Ware". Defrag the hard drives. Use a "Registry" Cleaner ( I use Warp Registry Cleaner, It's Free.) Do these four things in the order listed and things should improve. There are a lot of other things that could be done, But I think these are the main ones, and should be done every week.
George
Sign Guy, thanx, but I keep the system really clean of temp files, and I defrag every so often, altho none of the hard drive partitions is anywhere near full. As for the Registry Cleaner, I am not allowed to download anything, and the spyware does not identify itself and offer to be deleted.
And, like I wrote above, I can have several pages - which are separate files of two facing pages each, all with the same general format - open and typically two of them will have massive slowdowns on Copy/Paste, while the others will be fine. This tells me that the problem is file-related, not system-related.
Phil The View Manager is looking at the drawing and whats there, you can close it anytime you want in any ver. the info is still there you are just not being shown. And either way I don't think it's going to have anything to do with how fast the computer operates. The main thing with how fast a computer runs depends on how much you are ask Windows and the computer to do. The more you do to keep a computer running well the longer and better it will work. the more font's you have loaded plays a part in it also, and how you have the Windows screen setup, EVERYTHING has to be looked at.
My Thoughts GeorgePS: Good Luck
But the problem appears to be that ANY cdr object that is linked to a view, carries that view to any other cdr file that it is copied and pasted into. Earlier in this thred, I mentioned attempting tto attach a .cdr file that displayed the problem. I deleted EVERYTHING except the text - one line Arial - and the file was over 800K. So, I started from scratch, just now, with a blank template, the View Mgr showing zero stored views, and saved that file - 13K vs over 800K for what appeared to be the same thing, the only detectable difference being the stored thousands of views that were attached to the first text string, copied from an "infected" file.
I also just now checked older versions of the catalog, going back to 2008. The earlier versions have very few views attached, almost all in Chinese, as one of our Chinese sources appears to be the perp in this affair. Our understanding is that more recently, someone at the Chinese office decided to run a macro or something that recorded every single view...
Update: Our sysop got special permission to install StripViews this morning. StripViews runs whenever a new file is loaded, stripping out all the views stored in the View Manager, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands.
Result: no obvious change in load times or copy/paste delays. The file size for the test file with one line of Arial text and no other objects dropped from ~823k to ~7xxk, and the View Manager shows as empty. I shut down DRAW and rebooted the system, with no result. So, now we know that it isn't the stored views that are the problem. And, I defragmented the drive and did a search for temp files, just for due diligence. The only thing that I couldn't do anything about was whatever spyware or deranged anti-virus stuff might be running in the background. I know that something massive is running, as whenever I do a weekend search for new files, I get tons of stuff in my directory from various anti-virus software. But that is still beating around the bush, I suspect, as new files generally work fine, until I copy and paste something from an "infected" file. Then I start getting the same symptoms every time. But some older files work fine. ??? Suggestions? I checked every other location in Windows/Dockers for where that 700k might be hidinig. NADA, nothing, zilch. What am I missing?
PhilOsborn said:But some older files work fine. ???
How old is older?
Up to a certain version (11, perhaps), CDR files had a format of their own. From at least X4 onwards, and possibly including X3, they are actually zip files. If you're not sure, look at the CDR file in a hex editor like PsPad Hex. If the first two bytes are PK then you have a zip file.
You could also test this idea, by saving one of your "slow" files back to an old version, eg 9. If it opens faster then AV interference is a possibility.
"AV?" Tried saving to version 9 and then re-opening. No change. I've noticed that with all the "infected" files, they start opening and then the slider stops, about 40% across, hangs up there for 30 seconds or so, and then finishes. The healthy files open much more quickly.
Mek, checked all the dockers, including symbol. No luck. Looking into the file storage option. Don't have actual email here and DON'T want to use my personal email here, so I'll have to wait until later to retrieve the confimation from the sources. I'll get back to you tomorrow, i hope. Just had a couple odd occurences that may bear on this:1> Had a table that kept developing really strange attachments, every time I tried to paste a text block into it. Note that this was a hand-drawn table, made entirely out of rectangles, nothing fancy. So how did it get attached to the text? I could see the little tiny square handles for something... but couldn't select or delete it. If I copied the apparently empty table into a new document the ghost attachment went with it, but didn't show up in the Object Manger or anywhere else. I finally discovered that the pdf from which i was copying the text, via notepad to strip off the rich text attributes was still carrying internally some kind of unicode. When I saved the text from notepad, without any unicode, and reopened it, the problem disappeared.2> Just now, similarly, I was creating some little circular callouts, just a colored circle with text inside and stupidly copied directly from the pdf source... Not immediately, but a minute or so later, suddenly the new callouts started with the Copy/Paste deal, taking almost a minute to paste. It didn't happen immediately, which is doubly weird.
Based on observing the stripviews macro in action, I'm starting to wonder if it is possible to hide macros that do nasty things, or simply call home to papa every time something in a particular category happens in a file?
"When in trouble, stress or doubt,Just recall what it's all about,Will you go that extra mile,When inches away is:The circular file?"
Darn. Roadblock after roadblock in what should be a simple problem... Still can't upload a sample file, as when I got to the library, I discovered that my yahoo account had been hacked ... again. Tried to do the confirmation from yahoo for 2shared.com, but apparenlty it didn't take. Sigh.Meanwhile, here's a screen shot of the problem as related to the mystery table object I mentioned as point #1 above: (2nd try, as it appears that this editor does not allow .cpt files.)
Since the problem as shown above with the mystery attachment to the table appears to be unicode-related, is there an easy way to spot hidden unicode and remove it?
Note that the trailing DNA spiral looking tiny squares show up when I select the table only. I.e., I am not lassoing the spiral squares at all. Nevertheless, it appears, even though it should not be being selected at all. Normally, you either click directly on an object or you lasso it in order to select it, unlike the Adobe products that select everything you drag the mouse across. This is acting like an Abode select. I'm lassoing the table, but an object that doesn't even show up in the Object Manager and cannot apparently be isolated or delected without clearing the table still shows up like dark matter, adding a whole lot of bytes - 600K or so - to the file.
Success at last - Here's the file location!!!
http://www.2shared.com/file/Wg7J4TQD/CorruptedFile1.html
Phil,
problem is with color styles - Windows Docker Clolor Styles - when deleted the file size decrease. See attached file.
Best regards,
Mek