Can't start the latest dev version of RawTherapee for Win64

Well, everything was working great for the past two weeks until this morning. RT would not start - displayed a white screen in the tip image from the task bar.

MultiUser=false in the options file. Delete the option file and RT starts as if for the first time.

This happens with every recent dev build from @gaaned92 or from the Automated builds on Github. There must be something that I’m doing wrong as I’m sure it is not the builds themselves that are causing the problem. What is curious is that this happens within a week or two of each builds initial opening.

I have no idea!

Hi Mike,

I have the same experience. After having set MultiUser=false, with RawTherapee_dev_5.8-2847-g53bb6e41b_W64_Skylake_210422 - the next day it wouldn’t start again. I changed MultiUser to true and back to false, even tried to delete the options file - but none of this made any difference.

All these attempts were with Adobe Creative this and that - plus Bridge and Photoshop, etc. etc. loaded. I only have 16 GB lazy memory in this old pc.

Then one or two days later I attempted to start this dev version as the first app of the day, and surprisingly it started up - and since no problems when I honor that rule.

My amateur brain explains to me that perhaps dev RT needs all resources for a short moment until it is up running, but that’s probably a silly idea.

Actually I am totally in the dark with this problem, which may occur at any time again.

Kindly,
Eigil

when it happens, if you have a look at the option file, GUI section, you will notice that WindowsX and WindowsY have a very huge negative value so the RT window is out of the screen.

It can be due to an overflow somewhere.

You have 3 ways to correct

Well, I’ll be! That worked.

gaaned92,

The “more brutal way” didn’t work for me, as the first part of this thread shows.
Next time I’ll try the to zero the WindowsX and Y - but no reason to disturb the beast as long as it starts.

Thank you.

Made the experience, setting WindowX and WindowY to -32768 in the option file.

cedt_lfFCx90F2H

Then starting Rawtherapee

23qcSKCsti


It shows a white screen in the tip image from the task bar. This means that the window is out of screen.
Stopping RT, and setting the 2 variables to 0, starting RT bring back the window.

1 Like

gaaned92,

Thank you for the extra workaround.

I hope this will be solved with the RT 5.9 for the general purpose of having RT accepted in a wider group of new users. Otherwise it could very well be a primary showstopper for people not yet familiar with the great possibilities with RawTherapee.

A few days ago I installed this version:
RawTherapee_dev_5.8-2995-g166538dbc_W64_Skylake_210613

After the install, RT wouldn’t start on my win-pc - so I changed the MultiUser flag to false in the Options file - and from that on, RT started each day —

— until today!
(and this has now become a periodical pain in a lower body part)

One of the primary conditions for making RawTherapee attractive to a wider group of users is that the application starts - not now and then - but every time!

I had already changed the MultiUser flag to false - and apparently the Options file no longer include the Window-X and Window-Y parameters. Furthermore, deleting the options file don’t work either.
This reduces the remaining work-around options known to me to zero (0).

How do you start RawTherapee when the starting-trick from last week for some unknown reason doesn’t work any longer?

Seemingly the many dev versions since May 10 (my prior post) have not included a consistent solution to this problem on Windows machines.

I think it’s important to remove this periodical problem - once and for all.

There is a fix in the works for the window position: Improves RT window position management, fixes #6233 by Pandagrapher · Pull Request #6239 · Beep6581/RawTherapee · GitHub

I’m going to be a little pedantic here: nobody ever reported an issue on our bug tracker on GitHub about RT not starting except when setting MultiUser to false*, nor has there been a description of a reproducible problem here. Both make it much harder to think about a fix.

* This MultiUser trick indicates to me you have some kind of permission problem with the regular cache folder. If you put %LOCALAPPDATA% in the address bar of Windows Explorer and look for folders named RawTherapee, is there only one, or multiple?

Hi Roel,
Yes, there are two folders with RawTherapee in the C:/users/me/AppData/Local as shown in this screen copy:

Allow me to be a bit pedantic too. After the preceding tread I got the impression that this problem was widely recognized.

Further - I have read all notes coming with the new dev. versions and I have not seen a reference to AppData/Local.
So, when I was urged to install the dev. versions of RT on my desktop, I each time unpacked the new version in the same folder “RawTherapee Skylake” - then copied my personal settings from the older one, before I deleted it. I didn’t know there would be a folder in AppData/Local too.

RT is running again, but that happened before I got this message from you and deleted the older entrance in Local. I fiddled with removing options.txt and profiles and putting them back, and for some reason RT started up as a new installation with the Welcome window, and I had to renew my settings in Preferences.

I will be happy to report this “RT doesn’t start” problem, if it isn’t a redundant task by now?

Hi @Eigil_Skovgaard

Some precisions about location of options files:

  • refer to File Paths - RawPedia
  • When using MultiUser=true, the option folder is located in %LOCALAPPDATA%
  • the name of the option file was required by the dev to have a 5-dev suffix for all the development builds to avoid conflict with stable option folder.
  • thus my nightly builds have this suffix. For some unknown reason, automatic nightly builds can have a 5-dev-dev suffix it seems.

When you extract a nightly build, extract wherever you want. It will search the option folder in the above location.

To be clear about your issue:

  • Is your RT tip image in the task bar empty? It is thus the out of screen window issue
  • is it an other issue?

I think setting the MultiUser flag to false cannot be a solution for the out of screen window. In this case the option folder is located nearby the rawtherapee .exe.

@Thanatomanic
I tested the PR and it seemed to solve the issue (see my post in the PR itself). The better way to validate it is by far to commit it in the dev branch, unless it will not make its way in the stable version. Even if there is a workaroud, this issue is critical.

If I knew better GIT, I would systematically integrate the PR in my nightly builds.

s

The window fix will certainly be merged into dev soon, I agree it is a critical fix.

@Eigil_Skovgaard I have not seen the ‘5-dev-dev’ suffix before, and I think that certainly counts as a bug. When using the ‘official’ nightly builds from the RT GitHub, a cache folder with this name is created, which is silly. I’ll put an issue for that on our tracker in a moment.

However, this does not explain why RawTherapee won’t start if it is not because of the window issue. The cache folder should be created regardless of its name, except if there is a permission problem.

Yes, it was white. But the WindowX/Y fields are not available in options.txt in this version, otherwise I would have tried the zero-work-around.

Hard for me to decide - I am novice.

has to be “options” without txt

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Yes. If you have an options.txt file, it does not belong to rawtherapee.

Even if WindowX/Y fields are not available in “options” file, they will be created on RT closing in the [GUI] section.
And certainly they have to be present with a weird value, unless, if absent from the “options” file, the RT window is necessarily correctly displayed.

cedt_XQkBnbLZTc

Right, options is not a .txt file.
This is how it looks in Notepad:

Eigel,

Where you aware that the options file which refers to the “options” file in question is not the one in the RT program file. It is in the user\local\appdata. . . folder?

This is probably the root of the confusion. You are misunderstanding the purpose of this option file, please read the first three sentences:

# Only important or pre-first run parameters are left in this global option file.
# After the first run, all the parameters will be available in this global option file
# or in a new local option file, depending on the MultiUser value below

In other words - and in normal circumstances - this option file only serves as a template for your actual options file. This file is located in the C:\Users\<yourname>\AppData\Local\RawTherapee* folder, otherwise known as your local appdata or %LOCALAPPDATA%. This is the place where Windows stores configuration and cache information for many applications.

If you ever need to manually configure something for RawTherapee, this is the place to do so.

Edit: making changes to the options file in the RawTherapee installation folder is only ever necessary if you want to create a portable installation (Making a Portable Installation - RawPedia).

Oh, what a blunder - I have mislead myself by finding an option file in the main folder and had forgotten the reference from the beginning of this thread (which I actually used correctly at that time):

Sorry about that.

This also explains my confusion about the missing Window values from the continuation at 28/38.

Still the problem with RT not starting remains - on-off - and it’s not a distribution friendly problem.

Btw - how does RT manage the files generated in AppData\Local when a new version is installed (in my case on the Desktop)?

  1. Is the older folder in Local deleted and a new created, or
  2. are the older files in the folder just overwritten by the new files, or
  3. Is the older folder ignored and a new created ?