My entire program won't open

evilbad666's picture

So I was trying to organize files, so I opened up a ton of windows so I could just drag and drop the files from the windows and close the windows as necessary. So this is where the story begins, I opened all these windows and the program basically froze, but not only soulseek, my entire windows program seemed to glitch, only allowing me to access task manager and other programs, but not soulseek or explorer.exe. So, I tried restarting explorer.exe in task manager, then I restarted my computer when soulseek wouldn't open. So I tried opening soulseek again on re-open, lo and behold it does not open. So I tried system restore, I tried reinstalling it at the expense of my current downloads being lost, I tried messing around with compatibility settings. Lo and behold, the system will still not open.

Something is either seriously fucking up my program or there is some elegant little gremlin which is causing a simple but obscure problem. Either way, I need your help.

Hi evilbad666
basically I think your HD was just under full load when moving files around 8LED always lit), which means your windows hangs until the to do list is worked through. When you brake up SLSK while doing his config files you might mess up SLSK's "brain" which is not such a good idea. When your Explorer collapsed (or better was shut down by your doing in the task manager) the tray Icon of SLSK just was invisible so SLSK was pretty much alive up to that point. As long as a corrupt SLSK config file exists it might not start.
What I'd do:
a) run a chkdsk on your HD(s) so the file system is integre again
b) create another user account and log into this and test SLSK there (I estimate it will start there)=> your config files in the original user are corrupt
c) search for the config files "soulseek-client.dat*" and rename it to "Backup_due_Corruption_soulseek-client.dat....txt" so they are out of sight for SLSK
d) log into the old account and rebuild your SLSK config +user info.

Cheers

P.S.: for such file operations I'd advise using tools build for that like totalcommander, doublecommander, directory opus, ....

evilbad666's picture

That is very strange, I will try that if worst comes to worst. What I found though is that while I have major difficulty starting the program, the program does actually get up and running if you give it a lot of time. You mentioned something about totalcommander, doublecommander, directory opus, that sounds really helpful. Because when I download hundreds of files from one user, I often go in manually to sort the files by double clicking them so they open in an windows explorer window. So if I could somehow select all the files from a single user, because they often don't download into a new folder, then I could probably take care of this problem.

It froze again when I tried to pause the downloads from one user. This is very bizarre, because I have 16 gigs of ram on this computer.

Hi
Speed has not always to do with CPU/RAM/HD but a working together. RAM helps to cache a lot so to offload the slow HD, but windows is really bad in caching, so only a small percentage is used for that while the unused RAM lies wasted. My SLSK consumes about 250MB RAM and starts in 3 seconds. Watch the HD LED: as long as it is lit, there's no reaction to expect from windows/linux as it is waiting for the HD to complete whatever it asked for. Depending how much you DL and what you share it can consume much more RAM and take a lot more time to scan the files (share checking). Debugging slow systems (or behavior) is hard to describe. Basically the HD (or even SSD) is always the bottleneck as Windows depends on that reaction (that's why SSD speed up Windows much more than e.g. Linux).
Fileoperations are nothing the explorer was build for. As mentioned there are alternatives for that which gives much comfort and much more ease to accomplish your needs.
Cheers