1 installed and 2 portable instances get mixed up counts

Hi Andrew,

During a cold boot something got confused and my Installed instance started reporting the traffic detected by one of the Portables. As well, a popup claimed that two hot keys had already been registered.

My solution was to close the portables then the installed and restart them: first the installed, then the two portables and the correct counts were recorded.

I thought that each instance was discrete but apparently this is not the case, there's a short period of time when they all use a common workarea during startup and register hot keys and then recheck hotkeys and find them 'already registered'.

There are probably not many other folks that run 3 instances so now that I'm aware of this I can control it but thought that you should be aware as well.

J

Hi Andrew,
This happened again today when I installed the new release.
After the reboot I got a pop up stating "Driver operation error" and a second that the "Hot key Ctrl I has already been registered".
I believe these are related to one of my two portable instances which I have not run since I first reported this issue.
In order to 'fix' this I had to use Taskmgr to stop Networx because I couldn't Exit from the systray icon. It then started reporting the correct traffic.

My problem now is to remove the excess traffic from the Installed database and then to figure out how to avoid this in the future when installing updates to the Installed version.

Apart from that, the new version with Apps by Date is working OK.

So there is a 'bug' which involves Portable + Installed versions getting 'mixed up' when a new version of Installed is installed.

J

Could you please outline how this can be reproduced? Two portable versions in separate folders and one installed? Anything else?

I solved this.
I had had all instances set to NOT load with Windows and instead had put shortcuts in my Startup folder.
I just found that the last two updates defaulted to Load with Windows and so I was getting two instances of the Installed running and the 'last one' couldn't use the correct database so it 'found' the database and rules for the first Portable.
Once I removed the shortcut from the Startup folder everything was correct.

I thought that only one instance of the Installed could be running yet when I looked in Taskmgr there were two, which is what put me onto the problem and allowed me to fix it. It must be that when both the Load with Windows and the Startup folder shortcut are initializing that they don't realize that two are trying to start at the 'exact same time' but one gets the wrong database.

Also I thought that the portables didn't write anything to the registry but I found keys for both Portables as well as the Installed.
Now I may be the culprit here since I think that I copied the Installed database to the portable folders, but that was quite awhile ago and my memory isn't what it used to be so....

Also there was an 'old' URL key which pointed to a non-existant database folder "Stats" which had been used for the Installed version before I decided to apply a different name for consistency when I set up the bat file to kill-remove apps-restart all 3 instances. I've since removed that part of the bat file since you have the new Apps by Date and I renamed the Installed database folder to it's original name that agrees with the registry.

The pop ups about driver and hot key were due to the two instances of the Installed starting at the same time.

So, it's very unlikely that anyone else has done or will ever do what I'd tried. And I'm guessing that if the new versions hadn't forced the default to Load with Windows I'd never have seen the problem.

J