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[Ingo]

Hi,

I'm using (that is: trying to use) MC15 as a domain user with a roaming profile and redirected folders on Win7 x64.

My homedirectories (documents, music, ...) are like \\server\home$\username\documents but MC seems have it's own rules to build the folder names.
This leads to MC trying to access

Code: [Select]

C:\server\home$\user\Application Data\J River\Media Center 15\Thumbnails\{791639D5-42A6-496C-AE2E-3D8901C8374C}\Normal (v3)\Thumbnails (large).jmd
but in reality it is in

Code: [Select]

\\server\home$\user\Application Data\J River\Media Center 15\....

As a result I don't get any thumbnails saved or shown, and I get loads of crashes. Saving a logfile doesn't work (probably for more or less the same reason...) but debugview gives me stuff like

Code: [Select]

00000550 76.67938995 [5680] 0075551: 4228: Sharing Plugins: CHTTPRequestMessage::WritePreamble: Start
00000551 76.67980194 [5680] 0075551: 4228: Sharing Plugins: CHTTPRequestMessage::WritePreamble: Finish (0 ms)
00000552 76.68002319 [5680] 0075551: 4228: Reader: VHTTPMessage::Write (from reader): Wrote 206 bytes
00000553 76.68009186 [5680] 0075551: 4228: Reader: VHTTPMessage::Write (from reader): Finish (0 ms)
00000554 87.95981598 [5680] 0086830: 384: General: TopLevelExceptionFilter: Unhandled exception -- program crashing
00000555 87.95983887 [5680] 0086830: 384: General: TopLevelExceptionFilter: Message: 0, wParam: 0, lParam: 0, Window class: 
as the last lines...

please help me - and fix this bug...

I found this by using sysinternals' process monitor.

One more thing: MC seems to crash when it's unable to list the content of one of the upper level folders in the home folder path:
like in \\server\home$\username\... with \\server and \\server\home$\username content being listable but 'dir \\server\home$' giving a access denied.

Ingo

[Matt]

If the virtual home directories were working, I wouldn't think Media Center would even know the difference.  We expect full access to the user's roaming application data folder.  Double-check that there isn't some right being denied.

The application data folder is supposed to be the "safe" place to write stuff, so if we're getting denied access, we're going to fall apart.

[Ingo]

Hi Matt,

you're right, it should work - and MC shouldn't see much of a difference... but for thumbnails (I did some more tests, as it seems it's only for thumbnails) it doesn't work. MC tries to access this strange (and nonexistent) path.
If I manually create it all the way down to "Normal (v3)" it works. It saves thumbnails to this path - and everything else to my roaming profile...

Ingo

p.s: the missing .log files thing cleared - this was a permission problem... I could fix it on my own...
p.p.s.: as it seems you "fall apart" if the content of one of the upper level folders isn't listable. Usually not a problem but in my case it was (again, I could fix this for my system). If you look at Win7's (and probably Vista's) way of setting up "c:\documents and settings" folder (and similar old style folder) you probably should consider fixing this part as well)

Ingo

[Matt]

Hi Matt,

you're right, it should work - and MC shouldn't see much of a difference... but for thumbnails (I did some more tests, as it seems it's only for thumbnails) it doesn't work. MC tries to access this strange (and nonexistent) path.
If I manually create it all the way down to "Normal (v3)" it works. It saves thumbnails to this path - and everything else to my roaming profile...

Well I wonder, is it being denied access to create the thumbnail folders it needs?

p.p.s.: as it seems you "fall apart" if the content of one of the upper level folders isn't listable. Usually not a problem but in my case it was (again, I could fix this for my system). If you look at Win7's (and probably Vista's) way of setting up "c:\documents and settings" folder (and similar old style folder) you probably should consider fixing this part as well)

I agree.  I'm wondering if our main "create a folder" function is requiring access all the way to the root of the drive.  It at least has to be able to see the higher folders, or how else could it know if it needed to create the folder or if it was already there?

[Jaguu]

Redirection to %APPDATA%\J River to the server of the Thumbnails folder never worked! Thumbnails may have been created but they were never displayed on the local client.

As a workaround I had to create the thumbnail folder manually in the %LOCALAPPDATA%\J Riverl folder on the local system to get thumbnails displayed on the local pc.

If you redirect the %AppData% folder to the server, you never get thumbnails displayed, even if you tell MC15 to create missing thumbnails.

That was the case about 4 or 5 month ago, when I installed MC15 on different clients with all user folders redirected to the server (Windows 2003 Server). I don't think it has changed since then!

[Ingo]

Jaguu,

thanks for confirming this bug ;-)

And I can confirm that it started some time ago, 4-5 months might be the same time frame I've been experiencing those problems here - but I started using redirected folders around the same time...

Ingo

[Ingo]

Bump: still present in 118

additional thought: it could be due to a "\" not being escaped thing - and therefore leading to \\ be converted to \

Ingo

[Matt]

Could anybody post instructions to test a redirected app data folder pointing to a UNC path?  I've never done this.

Thanks.

[MrC]

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771969.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732275.aspx

[Jaguu]

Folder Redirection is a Windows property and it works automatically, So it does also in MC15. The folders %APPDATA%\[library,libraryBackup, Default RAW Cache, Image Cache and Temp] are properly redirected to the server and do work.

The problem is only the thumbnails folder. I think the pathname definition in the registry is faulty. The Thumbnail Base path is set by default to:
[Application Data Path]Thumbnails\. Probably it should be [Application Data Path]\Thumbnails\.

In Windows 7 there are 2 distinct variables for AppData: %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA%. If you want to keep data local on the client you need to use %LOCALAPPADATA% (usually C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Local\J River) , if you want to redirect to the server data needs to be in %APPDATA% (i.e. \\<server>\<sharename>\<username>\AppData\Roaming\J River).

Even if you enter the properly redirected pathname in the registry, thumbnailing does not work on the server. If thumbnailing is not supposed to work on a server, then it should go to %LOCALAPPDATA%.

The preferred setting in a Windows7 / Server environment is to keep %LOCALAPPDATA% locally and redirect %APPDATA% to the server, so that roaming profiles are being supported. I want my MC library and data on any pc that I log in.

Now, because thumbnailing works only locally, if I log in to a new pc on the network, MC needs to start building thumbnails for this pc again, which is quite redundant.

Redirection can be set in two ways:
a. Either by group policy
b. manually: go the the folder that you want to redirect, right click and select properties and there you will find a tab "Path*. In Windows XP only 4 folders could be redirected: My Documents, Desktop, Start Menu and ApplicationData (only MyDocuments could be done manually, the others only through Group Policies. Now there is a whole bunch of folders that can be redirected both manually and through group policies, but not AppData itself, only its subfolders Local, LocalLow and Roaming.

Hope this helps.

[Matt]

Thanks for the help.

Hopefully this will be fixed in build 121 and later.

The thumbnail path code was replacing \\ with \ to fix incorrect user entries.  This broke UNC names, since they _should_ have a \\ in them.

(p.s. [Application Data Path]Thumbnails\ is correct, although adding an extra slash will be cleaned up automatically)

[Jaguu]

Installed release 122 and tested! Bug has been! fixed. Thank you very much!

One small thing I noticed: I emptied the Thumbnail base path value in the registry (It contained the local path) before installing the newest release and was expecting that the MC15 installer would fill in it the correct value if the registry value was empty. So the first test was unsucessful as there was no thumbnail base path defined. But after entering the value [Application Data Path]Thumbnails\ manually in the registry, everything worked smoothly. The thumbnail folder was created on the server and thumbnail building started automatically.

Don't you guys check the existence of things you need to run the application and if missing fix it?  (Programming Manual - Chapter Defensive Programming: Check that everything is properly in place before you go!!)

[Ingo]

Hi Matt,

sorry for being a bit late...

thanks for fixing this bug. Also this version seems to have cured all my MC15 crashes so far.

Ingo