No free of speech in this forum

angryuser

New Member
So.. my post asking for support got deleted. No free of speech here for what I see or my post hurt your egos and can't handle the true. Well, let me repost without the hurtful parts...

I has spend the last 3 [edit: 5] hours reading faqs and posts and I concluded that Eraser 6 is [edited so nobody get craying: not working properly] on Win7 x64.

Version I tried:
Eraser 6.0.8.2273 = Crash at startup/Stop working
Eraser 6.0.8.2277 = Crash at startup/Stop working
Eraser 6.0.8.2280 = Crash at startup/Stop working

I had tried deleting the appdata file, the check disk C: as sugested in the faq..., uninstall and cleaning the registry manually and with software. Nothing works.

I was able to install Eraser 6.1.0.2284...
But, [edited or this will deleted]! No context menu!
Integrate Eraser into Windows Explorer; check! No context menu...
Again: *copy & paste is my friend*
I had tried deleting the appdata file, the check disk C: as sugested in the faq..., uninstall and cleaning the registry manually and with software. Nothing works.

So,[I'm very] frustrated.
Any suggestion? :evil:

PS. Just in case, the original post didn't contain profane words, neither this one, I'm very sad they tried to censor me, let see if they delete this again.
 
As a moderator, I am the responsible party. It depends of course what you mean by 'free speech'. Arguably, any forum which has rules does not allow free speech. I took the view that your previous post breached the rules, and removed the post, rather hoping that you would repost in a form that is within the (rather broad) scope of the forum rules, and I am pleased to see that that is what you have now done. No offence was meant by my action, and I apologise for any unintentionally given.

If Eraser 6 were not running properly on Win 7 x64, it would not be running on either of my machines that use this OS. But it is running on both those machines; on one I am using 6.0.8 and on the other a recent 6.1 build. The truth is that all the really intractable problems we are seeing with Eraser these days (having now had 2 service releases since the original general release of Version 6) are installation-specific. This includes the problem you are having.

Although a crash on startup is usually fixed by just deleting the Task List file, there are occasions when trying to fix the problem can be really frustrating. As I find myself installing and uninstalling Eraser on a variety of machines much more often than most people, I have had this frustrating experience too. So far, I have not failed to fix the problem with a brute force approach, that is by
  • uninstalling Eraser;
  • deleting all Eraser-related folders on the system I can still find, usually only the one in %LOCALAPPDATA%;
  • running one or more registry cleaners (I have 3, and they all find different things) to get rid of whatever traces they find;
  • using Regedit to locate every remaining Registry reference to Eraser, and deleting all those I feel are safe to delete;
  • rebooting before reinstalling Eraser.

Should one have to do this? Of course not. Can the Eraser Team fix the problem? I'm not sure. I think that the issue lies with the Windows Installer, and unless someone can come up with reproducible behaviour (i.e. a set of conditions under which the installation will certainly fail), I don't see that the Team have anything at all definite to work on.

In all of this, it is wise to bear in mind that, as open-source software, Eraser is produced by a tiny team of volunteers with very limited time and money. Users of such software are, to a significant extent, in the same position as users of beta software from a commercial company with more resources. The Eraser Team cannot hope to test builds on all or even most of the Windows configurations that exist. Eraser 6, it seems, works for most users. One can only hope that (as happened with Eraser 5, though it took a long time), solutions to the more intractable problems will gradually emerge. I hope that crashes caused by the Task List, for instance, will be much reduced, or even eliminated, when the List is rewritten in XML, which is a planned change.

I hope that this explains things.

David
 
Thank you DavidHB for your reply. I sincerely apologize for my lack of control of my temper and frustration. For me, this is not a 1 or 2 days issue...

Question, do you now the registry entry related to the context menu that I can entry them manually?
 
The important thing here is that we are able to help, at least to some degree. I too have experienced your frustrations, and still have one machine (an ancient XP laptop) on which Eraser, though usable, is not entirely well behaved. You will not find me, or Joel the programmer for that matter, claiming that everything in the garden is rosy. What I would say is that I am not aware of any free alternative to Eraser (though there is some overlap with CCleaner), so the project is worth persevering with.

angryuser said:
Question, do you know the registry entry related to the context menu that I can entry them manually?
No, and I'm sure they vary between Windows versions. What I do is use regedit.exe to search in the Registry (Ctrl+F to specify the search, F3 to find the next item) on the word "Eraser". It seems to be quite a good search term, with few false positives. Eraser itself has quite a tightly defined and located set of keys; the problem children are the keys and values specified and/or required by the standard Windows installation process.

David
 
I have Win 7 64 bit and *was* using the latest version of eraser (the one released in November).

I had to uninstall it for reasons mentioned in another post - memory leeching.

And it was happening on this system and my laptop downstairs so I would have to concur - Win 7 64 bit and Eraser are not happy bedfellows.
 
chuckles1066 said:
I have Win 7 64 bit and *was* using the latest version of eraser (the one released in November).
I had to uninstall it for reasons mentioned in another post - memory leeching.
And it was happening on this system and my laptop downstairs so I would have to concur - Win 7 64 bit and Eraser are not happy bedfellows.

You may try version 5, by the time of my last post here I discovered that version 5 works perfectly. I was told or read that version 5 wasn't compatible with Win7 because it was made before Win7, not true, it works and works better than v6.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/ ... 205/5.8.8/

In another note, I was able to install Eraser 6.1.0.2284 "successfully" with the context menu working. When installing version 5 I noticed that the installer first install the C++ Runtime. Then I uninstalled v5, and I decompress v6.1 and you will get this files:

dotnetfx35setup.exe
Eraser (x64).msi
Eraser (x86).msi

Now decompress dotnetfx35setup.exe and run the setup, at the end the setup will say that the dotnetfx35 was installed in the first place (I knew it but I did it anyway), then proceed to install Eraser (x64).msi, then restart and done. Context menu works. I don't know if v5 have something to do with it, or the C++ Runtime or the .netfx runtime, but Eraser 6.1 "magically" fix it self and works and I'm still test it.

PS, pardon my english.
 
There are lots of interesting points here.

Version 5, albeit unsupported, does run on Vista and Windows 7. It is less able than Version 6 to deal with the security features introduced in Vista. The result is that user experience of Version 5 under the newer OSs has been a bit varied; I used it with Vista for a while, on a setup that had UAC disabled, and it functioned reasonably well but was quite often blocked by Windows.

Context menus are handled quite differently in Version 5 from Version 6; I would not expect the former to have any bearing on the latter, except that spurious entries can be left in place if you install version 6 without uninstalling Version 5 first.

As you have discovered, the Eraser installer decompresses the MSI files, identifies which one needs to be used, and then hands it over to the Windows Installer, which performs the whole installation, including creating the context menu entries. I think it quite likely that it was your re-installation of the .NET runtime that resolved your problem.

By the same token, the memory issues referred to by chuckles1066 have to be a function of the individual Windows/.NET installation, as .NET does all the memory management for the applications it supports, and there is therefore no memory management code in Eraser as such.

David
 
The main thing here possibly causing the context menus to not appear would be, yes, the Visual C++ Runtime. Eraser's installer should automatically install that, and in your case it didn't. Since that worked for you, I'll leave it as that (there's not much that can be done from a developer's standpoint either, as we are using Microsoft's prescribed method of installing the runtimes)
 
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