zhangkekf

17 hours ago, Will_Kaydo said:

Okay, but Activate Cakewalk again. Remove it from your Antivirus (including windows defender) or disable it for this test and try opening a project again. 

I found this post last night, and it solved my trouble:

The post tell that : When you open a project, cakewalk / sonar platinum will try to lookup some zip file outside the project and try to extract it. If you encounter a damaged zip file or a zip file that takes a long time to extract, you will always hang at the "creating UI".

Because of conclusion in topic above, I remember that I created a huge zip file at  "D:/mydata.zip" not long ago. Extracting it will take 20 minutes more.

And  I opened any project in cakewalk and hang at "creating UI" for 20 minutes or more time .

I removed the D:/mydata.zip and all projects were loaded successfully and faster!

But why was the Cakewalk even trying to unzip a zipfile that is not in the content directory or the project folder?

Please see here:  

I've been troubled by this problem for a long time.

The post tell that : When you open a project, cakewalk / sonar platinum will try to lookup some zip file outside the project and try to extract it. If you encounter a damaged zip file or a zip file that takes a long time to extract, you will always get stuck in the "creating UI".

Because of conclusion in topic above, I remember that I created a huge zip file at  "D:/mydata.zip" not long ago. Extracting it will take 20 minutes more.

And  I opened any project in cakewalk and hang at "creating UI" for 20 minutes or more time .

I removed the D:/mydata.zip and all projects were loaded successfully and faster!

But why was the Cakewalk even trying to unzip a zipfile that is not in the content directory or the project folder?

Please see here:

 I've been troubled by this problem for a long time.

The post tell that : When you open a project, cakewalk / sonar platinum will try to lookup some zip file outside the project and try to extract it. If you encounter a damaged zip file or a zip file that takes a long time to extract, you will always get stuck in the "creating UI".

Because of conclusion in topic above, I remember that I created a huge zip file at  "D:/mydata.zip" not long ago. Extracting it will take 20 minutes more.

And  I opened any project in cakewalk and hang at "creating UI" for 20 minutes or more time .

I removed the D:/mydata.zip and all projects were loaded successfully and faster!

But why was the Cakewalk even trying to unzip a zipfile that is not in the content directory or the project folder? 

Please see here:

 I've been troubled by this problem for a long time.

The post tell that : When you open a project, cakewalk / sonar platinum will try to lookup some zip file outside the project and try to extract it. If you encounter a damaged zip file or a zip file that takes a long time to extract, you will always get stuck in the "creating UI".

Because of conclusion in topic above, I remember that I created a huge zip file at  "D:/mydata.zip" not long ago. Extracting it will take 20 minutes more.

And  I opened any project in cakewalk and hang at "creating UI" for 20 minutes or more time .

I removed the D:/mydata.zip and all projects were loaded successfully and faster!

But why was the Cakewalk even trying to unzip a zipfile that is not in the content directory or the project folder? 

Please see here:  

 I've been troubled by this problem for a long time.

The post tell that : When you open a project, cakewalk / sonar platinum will try to lookup some zip file outside the project and try to extract it. If you encounter a damaged zip file or a zip file that takes a long time to extract, you will always get stuck in the "creating UI".

Because of conclusion in topic above, I remember that I created a huge zip file at  "D:/mydata.zip" not long ago. Extracting it will take 20 minutes more.

And  I opened any project in cakewalk and hang at "creating UI" for 20 minutes or more time .

I removed the D:/mydata.zip and all projects were loaded successfully and faster!

But why was the Cakewalk even trying to unzip a zipfile that is not in the content directory or the project folder? 

On 12/8/2021 at 12:45 AM, Thomas S Carlisle said:

First, let me say I have been a faithful Cakewalk user since about 2010, so I am not new to the product. I am an IT Professional with about 30 years experience, so not new to the concepts of software installation and troubleshooting. Also have been a developer so not new to the concept of applications should not swallow exceptions -- and I do think that is what is happening here. Lastly, applications should  provide feedback to the user, ideally a log file that users can use to troubleshoot and understand what conditions made the application go into a bad state. 

So I post this to help others who land here, and also hoping that the dev team considers making this product more supportable, e.g. through logging. Because that would have saved me literally about 10 hours. 

Just to mention: in troubleshooting this I found this: 

And a few others. 

At the end of the day, it wasn't board drivers, chipset INF's, video drivers, etc. It was due to having files on the desktop. Not files having to do with a cakewalk project, e.g. not loading a project from a folder on the desktop. Not, it was because I had a file related to software development  on my desktop. It was a zip file of material icons, and for whatever reason cakewalk was trying to do something with that file -- over and over and over and was stuck. 

Once I was able to see something that pointed me to this, it was an easy fix --- stop leaving junk on the desktop. But how much I had to do to be able to see what was happening, was entirely too much. This is where an application logfile would really have helped, because I'd have seen in that app log the attempt to open that zip file over and over. 

Lacking that, here is what I did:

1) Went to another computer and installed. I figured if it did the same thing, no sense looking further. But, if that were the cae there would be a lot of posts about the problem. So I did expect it to work, and it did. Problem is, I want it to work on my most powerful rig. 

2) I created a dump file of the task, and opening that with windbg gives me this:

00000000`001471d0 00007ff8`f812e5ac : 00000000`00147726 00000000`00147310 00000000`2160d170 00000000`00147310 : zipfldr!CEnumArchive::_DirExistsInEnumerator+0x48

SYMBOL_NAME: zipfldr!CEnumArchive::_DirExistsInEnumerator+48

MODULE_NAME: zipfldr

IMAGE_NAME: zipfldr.dll

FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: BREAKPOINT_80000003_zipfldr.dll!CEnumArchive::_DirExistsInEnumerator

OS_VERSION: 10.0.19041.1

BUILDLAB_STR: vb_release

OSPLATFORM_TYPE: x64

OSNAME: Windows 10

IMAGE_VERSION: 10.0.19041.789

3) From this, it looks like an exception is thrown in the zip module within one of the C++/.Net assemblies. So off I went to ensure the c++ redist is right, etc. to No avail. 

If only I had a way of knowing what file the app was trying to zip or unzip.... again, an app log that shows things which are attempted but not successful would be a good thing. 

4) Next I tried to run cakewalk from another account on the computer. It worked! Ok, so just use another account for music production. Not a big deal. But the tech inside of me just couldn't leave it at that. 

5) Clearly, something about the user profile was the issue. So I went through the process of trying to rebuild the user profile and just make the account this app works under be the account I use for everything. But, once I got all the appdata and files migrated to the working user profile, now the app doesn't work under THAT profile. Interestingly, it now worked under the original profile. 

6) So clearly, it isn't the account or the registry of the account, but something in the files. So I migrated files back to the original account, and sure enough the original account no longer works and the other account works again. I wish I had a way of knowing what files the app was trying to open or create.... again, logging is your friend in 2021.

7) I spent some time trying to narrow down which files make the issue appear/disappear, but it is like a needle in a haystack. Finally, I used procmon64.  Since I knew the problem was file driven, not registry driven, I could filter out and just show files. Still, it was a lot of stuff to wade through. 

But I was able to find, after the point that "Creating UI" appears and the app hangs, I was able to find a lot of attempts to access that zip file on my desktop. So I copied all files on my desktop somewhere else, and now cakewalk works. And last, but not least, if I copy that file back to the desktop, it breaks cakewalk. 

What file was it? Material Design Icons: https://github.com/google/material-design-icons/releases/tag/4.0.0

It turns out, for whatever reason, if you click on that zip file in windows, windows explorer hangs trying to open it. 7zip opens it just fine. Thus, the underlying issue is this zip file somehow being incompatible with windows native libraries that apps use. 

If this was a zip file in my project directory, or in my content directory, or my VST folder(s) I would understand it, and would have honed in on that pretty much immediately. But without any logging information to go on, I would not think to consider zip files that are outside of those specific areas which this app should be using. 

And no, I wasn't storing the project on the desktop. Yes, I get that apps like this will "watch" the files/directories under the project folder so the app knows of external changes. There is no reason cakewalk should have been "watching" my desktop. 

So I guess in conclusion, I began thinking I was recommending the app implement logging, so users understand what might be going on when the app doesn't work as expected. 

But now, I am recommending the app developers look at this because whether it is intended or not, upon close examination the app does appear to be looking outside the bounds of the project folder, and raises brows from a security/privacy perspective. 

Thanks a lot!!!!    I've been troubled by this problem for a long time!!!

Because of your conclusion, I remember that I created a huge zip file at  "D:/mydata.zip" not long ago. Extracting it will take 20 minutes more.

So I opened any project in cakewalk and hang at "creating UI" for 20 minutes .

I removed the D:/mydata.zip and all projects were loaded faster!

I'm having the same issue with all my projects.....

6 hours ago, Will_Kaydo said:

Activate Cakewalk.

Connect to the internet. Click the help tab> sign in> activate Cakewalk. 

It doesn't seem to have anything to do with activation. I actived before I tried to reinstall, but not work. 

Last night I just left it there. One night later, the project was loaded successfully and work well.

The newly created project can be loaded quickly. But history projects takes a long time (one night) to load, even a very small project（only 30s music and only a Alicias Keys in kontakt 6）

I found the CPU has been busy (20% by cakewalk) during loading. It continues until the end of loading.

The strange thing  has never happened before.

I reinstalled all historical versions of cakewalk, Even the previous Sonar Platinum(23.10.0.14), but were not working for history projects like this. 

I've been waiting for a long time. Why?

All projects couldn't be loaded like this. 

What should I do?