Naughty Crashy Layout!!! Help Me Kill it!!!

[keshalyi]

I have, gloriously, inhereited a databse from another developer, now long gone, in it, I have a layout, called 'Help' which is, apparanetly, corrupt, as it freezes the entire computer, to where I have to do a hard boot, every time I go to it, in any mode, under any circumstances.

I want to get rid of it! Its sittig there in a list of layouts, waiting to be selected, waiting to have some hapless developer choose it and corrupt the whole file because it hangs halfway through some important thingy. How can I kill it, though, if I can go to the layout first? Thoughts? Feelings? I tried cloning the dB - it still freezes...

[Kurt Knippel]

Usually what happens is that there is some object on the layout that is corrupted. Filemaker only deals with objects that can be seen, so size the window in layout mode such that only the status are is visible, which will allow you to switch to the layout via the menu or the book-thingy. Once there you should be able to delete the layout.

Failing this you could try a recovery.

[harryk]

There is a chance that if you can't access it on your computer and your Filemaker version, somebody else (or you) with another Filemaker version, or another OS or a windows machine, can. If you inherited it, it might be an older version and the older version might do the trick: ie delete the bastard. What system and version are you on? What's the database made in?

Harryk

(Captcurt crossed by mailing with a far better option..)

[LiveOak]

If it is an object on a layout, you may be able to go to it as long as the object doesn't try to render (display). Go to layout mode on another layout, scroll all the way down and/or to the right so that no objects show, then switch to the corrupt layout. If this works, you will then be able to delete it.

-bd

[bobsmith]

I have the same problem with a somewhat complicated database that I do not want to rebuild. I did have backup copies but this problem showed up later and was also a problem in the backup copy. I can not delete or modify the layout since everytime I try to access it the computer freezes. Since I am the only one, at this time that is doing modifications to this database I just try to live with it. I know that as some time I will have to rebuild. Not an answer, just that you are not the first.

[bobsmith]

Cancel my last post. I tried Live Oak's suggestion and IT WORKED. This saved me a ton of work, many many thanks. You can really learn some tricks from this forum.

[Helpful Harry]

I had this same problem using one database I'd created. When I brought back an updated version it kept crashing on my beige G3 Mac (where I'd first created it), but worked perfectly on the clients Macs - all using MacOS 7.5 to 9.2. The same happened whenever I tried to open the TIFF file I was using to draw/store all the graphic elements, and it was always the same couple of graphic elements trying to display that crashed the Mac.

I finally managed to track down the problem thanks to someone on the Usenet Newsgroups. Under certain unknown conditions, some of graphics can cause a problem with the driver software for my ATI graphics card. The solution was to use the Extension Manager and disable the 'ATI Graphics Accelerator' extension and reboot my Mac. Things like window scrolling were a bit painful, but I could now access the database without it crashing.

Fixing the graphic seems to be a hit and miss. In Layout mode you can cut the offending graphic, paste it into a blank document any editing application (AppleWorks, PhotoShop, etc.), deselect and then reselect it, and copy/paste it back to FileMaker and everything works again when I re-enable the ATI Extension and reboot ... [color:"blue"]BUT it can reoccur and sometimes with a different graphic and I still haven't found a permanent solution to this yet.