Digital Workshop

Having some trouble with publishing when creating Opus Pro pubs. (Not having this trouble with Flex pubs)

Publication preview fine but when I publish them to EXE file seems very sluggish. It takes up to 20 seconds to redraw the icon in Windows Explorer when you open the fodler or highlight it with the mouse. During this time Windows Explorer seems to 'freeze' entirely.

It seems to happen regardless of of the size or complexity of the publication.

You can imagine my dismay after being so enthusiastic and singing it''s praises to colleagues and clients to find I can't show them the end result without long minutes of hanging about waiting the the file to show itself!

I have tried:

Publishing with another icon in case something was corrupted but no difference.

The 'reset registry settings' thing with CTRL ALT onm starting Opus.

Another PC.

I'm using all the default setting in thepublish options.

PC is A windows 200 machine with 128MB RAM which I know could be better.

Does the speed of the machine your piblishing it on affect the speed of the end publication? The machine it will be running on will be lower psec if anything.

Any suggestions?

(I haven't installed Opus SP2 yet--was waiting for everyone else to find the bugs ) so I'm going to give that a go next, but any other suggestions?

Updated to add that Service Pack 2 didn't help.

Opus has been designed to produce publications which run on the widest possible range of system configurations and processor speeds. However, a particularly multimedia-heavy publication (for example, running four videos simultaneously) will obviously run better on a high-spec system.

However, I suspect that the problems you have encountered are not related to the system spec, but suggest issues communicating with the graphics drivers or DirectX components, or perhaps a problem with the original Opus installation. I would therefore recommend the following procedures:

Please first uninstall all versions of Opus from your system. To do this, click Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs. Look through the list of installed programs for any references to Illuminatus Opus, Illuminatus Opus Pro, Opus Pro XE, Opus Presenter, Opus Pro 04, Opus Pro XE 04 or Opus Presenter 04. If found, click on the entry to highlight it, then click the Remove button to uninstall the software.

Once all versions of Opus have been uninstalled, please right-click on your Start button and select Explore... Navigate to C:\Program Files and look for any folders referring to Illuminatus Opus, Illuminatus Opus Pro, Opus Pro XE, Opus Presenter, Opus Pro 04, Opus Pro XE 04 or Opus Presenter 04. If found, simply click on the folder to highlight it, then press Delete on the keyboard.

Once all Opus program folders have been deleted, click Start > Run, type regedit and click OK. Double-click on the HKEY_CURRENT_USER folder to display its contents. Double-click on the Software folder to display its contents. Now single-click on the Digital Workshop folder to highlight it and press Delete on the keyboard. Click Yes to confirm the deletion. Now please close the Registry Editor using the X icon in the top-right of the screen.

Now reinstall Opus using the original installation CD-ROM. Once installed, please download and install the latest Service Release 2 update from ftp://ftp.digitalworkshop.com/pub/opusu ... 04_SR2.exe. Now launch Opus, load in your publication and publish.

Once the publish process is complete, please write the published files to CD and test to see if the launch delay is still apparent.

If the problem persists, please try updating the graphics drivers and DirectX components on the problem systems to see if this improves performance. To do this:

Please visit www.microsoft.com/windows/directx and follow the instructions given at the web site to locate, download and install the latest version of DirectX.

Once DirectX has been updated (and the system restarted), please use the following procedure to update your graphics drivers:

- Click Start > Settings > Control Panel > System - Select the Device Manager tab (if you are using Windows 2000 or XP, you will need to select the Hardware tab and then click the Device Manager button)
- You should see a list of hardware types currently installed on your machine. Click on the plus-sign next to the Display Adapters entry to display the corresponding component
- Make a note of the make, model and any other information displayed
- Now visit the manufacturer's website (in most cases, this will be either www.nvidia.com, www.ati.com or www.matrox.com) and click the Download Drivers link on the homepage
- Follow the on-screen instructions to locate the latest drivers for your model of graphics card. Once located, download and install the drivers using any advice given on the manufacturer's site

Once latest drivers have been successfully installed (and the system restarted), please test the publication and see if the launch time has improved.

If the problem persists, I would look to see if there are any background processes which could be conflicting with the publication. For example, try temporarily disabling any real-time virus scanners which may be hindering the streaming of data from the CD-ROM to system RAM, then test the publication. Please also try disabling any screensavers which may be configured on the system as these have been known to affect the performance of publications (although not usually at launch time).

If these steps do not resolve the problem, please forward the publication .imp file to Digital Workshop Technical Support along with as much information about the problem systems as possible (for example, operating system, RAM and make and model of motherboard and graphics card/chipset).

I hope this helps. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any further queries.

Kind regards,

I think I might have solved it, or at least narrowed it down.

It only happenes when the published EXE files are sat on a network drive.

Bit of a nuisance to me as I need to keep stuff on a fileserver in order to get it backed up properly and it's where all my working files are.

However the finished programs will all be run locally from the end users machines so the problem shouldn't affect them.

I'll just have to publish to a folder on my own machine while I'm testing them.

Be curious to know if it affects anyone else though. I don't remember it happening with 2.81

Cheers for the graphic driver info anyway--I'm sure my PC was in need of a job lot of updates anyway

I suspect that your antivirus software is playing a part in this. Try temporarily disabling the 'real-time' or 'on-access' scan engine and test to see if the problem is resolved. If so, you may need to configure your virus scanner to permit running of executables across the network (or simply copy Opus publications to the local drive before testing).

Kind regards,

Robin, Yup, that seems to be the culprit.

Grisoft AVG 7 Network Edition seems unhappy looking at Opus pubs (though not any other executables that I've noticed)

Version 6 of AVG didn't have this problem, I've still got that on other PCs and can access the network files fine from those. Un fortunately they're discontinuing support for it shortly.

I can work around it. It's a just nuisance.

Cheers for your help.

Try publishing to an .exe and .ilm file. I suspect your virus checker is checking all of the .exe file everytime, which will include all the resources and so may take some time. More intelligent virus checkers just do the active part.

Dave

Dave, Nope made no difference. The pubs I was using to test it out are small with very few imported images etc anyway.

In fact the one I first noticed it on was a one page pub with a single text box which I used to try out Robin suggestion of embedded fonts from another thread.