SSMS Locks up using Refactor

ccraig

I'm using version 9.00.3042 of SSMS on a Win 2000 SP2 workstation. Version 1.2.0.6 of Refactor. It's been working fine , well, forever, today SSMS locks up. Any thoughts?

Brian Donahue

Hello,

Thanks for your post. I don't think we ever test our software on anything less than Win200 SP4, but I think that's a moot point seeing as it seemed to be working for you anyway with SP2.

I am aware, however, that within the last two weeks there have been a number of incidents of SQL Refactor failing to operate, specifically when invoking any function aside from Help->About and licence activation. From what I can tell, some Windows function is waiting for a message that never comes and SSMS is hung because of that. I'm still collating information from all of the affected users.

Can you please let me know if you have recently installaed any updates to the .NET Framework? Specifically I am looking for a particular version of System.Drawing.dll (it's probably in the GAC at %systemroot%\assembly) that may be causing the problem.

I hope that I can narrow down the cause of this issue soon. Thanks!

Brian Donahue

Although I have been unable to reproduce the problem, I have discovered some things while debugging Refactor. One is that the dump sent to me by one customer indicates that there is a wait happening for a message in one of the windows when there are no Refactor windows visible. The second is that the same Unhandled Exception pops up reliably any time a Refactor window is opened, even when Refactor is working correctly. The type of exception is a ThreadAbortException.

My theory is that the thread abort may cause the Refactor application's AppDomain to unload in some (unknown) circumstances. I can stop this exception from happening by changing a configuration option in SqlWb.exe.

Can you please try this:

• Open the directory %programfiles%\microsoft sql server\90\tools\binn\vsshell\common7\ide in Windows Explorer
• Open the file SqlWb.exe.config with Notepad
• Change the line <legacyUnhandledExceptionPolicy enabled="1"/> to <legacyUnhandledExceptionPolicy enabled="0"/>
• Launch SSMS and invoke a SQL Refactor menu item

I hope this works! If not, please put SqlWb.exe back the way it was.

Brian Donahue

Hi,

I have also been made aware that in one case, the Microsoft extensibility components were improperly installed -- some of the COM interfaces were not properly registered.

It may be a matter of re-installing or repairing the installation of SQL Server Management Studio to get Refactor working again.

Ben Pinchen

SQL Refactor 1.3 has now been released and we believe that the reported layout hangs are fixed in this release version. However, some of those hangs were not reproducible in our test environment and so it was not possible to test every specific case.

You can upgrade by 'checking for updates' in a previous version of SQL Refactor or it can be downloaded from

http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Refactor/index.htm

shadowbob

This issue or one like it has started affecting me today, after I made no changes to my system. This is with Refactor 1.3.0.207 and SSMS 2008. Refactor has started locking up SMMS. In addition, Prompt has started behaving erratically.

I did a repair of SQL 2008 and uninstalled Refactor / reinstalled it from the latest Toolbelt installer. All issues seem to have been solved.

I strongly suspect some corruption on my hard drive at this point. Just posting here to let people know what the solution was.