[Rwp] a fun Reaper crashing experience

[James Teh]

1. Does the freeze occur if you use ReaAccess instead of OSARA? It's 
possible the freeze is an OSARA bug, though I've no idea what might be 
causing it.

2. As for why the process hangs around even once you terminate it, I've 
seen this before. My (fairly certain) guess is that if a DAW doesn't 
release the audio device correctly and it still has outstanding requests 
(i.e. because it terminated abnormally), the driver doesn't cancel those 
requests correctly when Windows asks it to. Basically, when you exit a 
process, Windows asks drivers to cancel all outstanding requests, but if 
a driver is buggy (which sadly applies to a lot of audio drivers), it 
can get stuck. I see this quite a bit with abnormal exits with my 
M-Audio Fast Track C600. I also see occasional blue screens with this 
driver if I'm doing stuff other than just DAW work. The problem with 
semi-pro/pro audio hardware vendors is that if you do anything they 
consider slightly outside the norm for a DAW (like, you know, put your 
computer to sleep instead of shutting it down or have a DAW which 
occasionally crashes), they just say that's unsupported and thus justify 
not fixing their stupid driver bugs. Rant aside, if you want some 
technical detail about this unkillable process weirdness, see this page:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/08/17/unkillable-processes.aspx

So, in short, if we can fix the freeze, you won't end up with an 
unkillable process... but the fact that the process is unkillable after 
the freeze is almost certainly a driver bug.

Jamie

On 9/04/2015 2:49 PM, Patrick Perdue via RWP wrote:
> So, I've been using Reaper for about five years, regularly for a bit 
> over 4, and I've never seen this one.
>
> I'm using Reaper v4.77x64 with OSARA, and am having a fun issue 
> wherein Reaper crashes almost every time I leave it's main window and 
> come back.
> Not quite a normal crash though.
> It stops responding, so I press alt+f4 to close the window, which 
> gives the normal "reaper is not responding" error.
> So, after the UI goes away, reaper.exe, ReaperHost32 and 
> ReaperHost64.exe are all still in the task manager. If I try to end 
> reaper.exe, nothing happens. Same for ending the process tree. If I go 
> to the command line and type "taskkill /im reaper.exe /f"
> I get an error similar to
> "The process reaper.exe with PID 1984 could not be terminated. Reason: 
> an instance of this process is not running."
> So, I still have this old instance of Reaper hanging around, taking up 
> a bunch of memory. I can launch Reaper again, but when I do, I get 
> errors about not being able to access audio and midi devices, 
> presumably because the old Reaper still has access to those devices, 
> and won't close properly. Even if I log out of Windows and don't 
> restart, while the process is no longer running, those devices still 
> can't be accessed, unless I restart Windows.
>
> While editing a project, I've probably restarted this computer an 
> average of 7 times in an hour. A bit hard to be productive like that.
>
> If it matters, I am using bridged mode, with both 32 and 64-bit VST 
> plugins. No DirectX, converted or otherwise.
> Reaper even crashes sometimes when going to effects windows for 
> tracks, but not consistently with one plugin. It could be that I have 
> a bad something in the chain of one of the tracks in this project, 
> which is causing Reaper to flop over, but I haven't been able to 
> figure out if that's the case, because it crashes when I try.
>
> Has anyone ever seen this particular issue, or something like it?
> I realize that, without the exact combination of hardware, software 
> and project I'm using, probably no one will be able to replicate this 
> exactly, but I'd sure love to have a clue about why this is happening.
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-- 
James Teh
Email/MSN Messenger/Jabber: jamie at jantrid.net
Web site: http://www.jantrid.net/
Twitter: jcsteh