Mark Jago wrote:
I am experiencing a rather annoying problem with LyX 1.4.3-5, running on
XP.
Every now and then (say a couple of times per hour) LyX all of a sudden
stalls. lyxc.exe starts hammering the CPU at 50% for about 2 to 5 minutes.
Meanwhile I cannot do a thing in LyX. Not even the LyX windows is updating.
Then, after a few minutes, the CPU drops, the fan on the computer slows
down, and I can resume using LyX as if nothing had happened. The frequency
of these interruptions seems to be correlated to the length of the document
and the number of documents opened. The more things opened, the more and
longer interruptions.
Why this frustrating problem with LyX? I have tried updating to newer
versions, but of some reasons I run into other problems; font problems.
This
is why I stick to version 1.4.3-5.
I think what you're experiencing may be covered by this discussion
thread: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg51319.html.
(Sorry, can't find the start of the thread.) Anyway, back around the
version you're using, LyX would sometimes do something (presumably
writing to the screen) that would send csrss.exe (a piece of Windows)
into a temporary tailspin. I don't know if the developers ever figured
out exactly what it was (might have been a problem with Qt that the Qt
developers fixed), but LyX 1.4.4 and onward seem to be immune to the
problem.
As far as updating (highly recommended), if the font problem to which
you alluded is that the math symbols disappear or display incorrectly in
the GUI (but are correct in the compiled documents), that's a known
phenomenon for which there is a workaround. I keep a copy of the
BaKoMa4LyX font archive (the fonts LyX uses in the GUI) on my desktop.
When an upgrade clobbers the fonts, I do the following:
1. unpack the archive to a temp directory;
2. use the Windows font manager applet to delete the BaKoMa fonts
(eight of them as I recall);
3. use the font manager to reinstall them from the temp directory;
4. restart LyX.
That typically fixes things, although I've seen other posts indicating
that some people have to log off Windows and log back on to get the
change to kick in (I don't recall having to do that). Mind you, the
fonts I'm installing are identical to the ones I uninstalled -- I did a
binary file comparison to test that -- but it seems to work. I haven't
had to do this in maybe six months, knock on silicon chip, but I've seen
a couple of posts lately indicating that people installing 1.5.0rc2 may
have run into this again.
Anyway, if that's the font problem, my take is that occasionally
reinstalling fonts is less hassle than watching csrss eat all your CPU
cycles.
/Paul
