Why is Crystal Reports 8 freezing?

Question

I have a problem with Crystal Reports 8. When exporting a report from my application, Crystal Reports sometimes freezes. The progress windows just stays, saying X of X records exported.

1. Smaller reports with less data are more likley to freeze.
2. Faster workstations (P4, Core2) tend to freeze much more often, sometimes every second try. On older workstations (< P2) no freezing happens at all, or at least once every one or two days.
3. The export format (rtf, pdf, html, rpt) does not influence the freezing behavior.
4. The same report can be successfully exported multiple times with excactly the same data, but eventually it will freeze.
5. No freezing happens on Windows Vista (!)

Is there a way to stop this or at least a way to predict a freeze?

Answer 1

After a long search we finally tracked down the source to a WaitForSingleObject(?, INFINITE) call. It seems like CR8 has some synchronization errors which become obvious on fast workstations.

It is somehow related to the progress window, and the animations in Vista seem to mitigate the problem.

Theoretically the solution would be patching the problematic file and replacing the WaitForSingleObject with a timeout parameter.

Answer 2

CR 8 is a fairly old product, you may want to check whomever owns it now (Business Objects still?) for updates (hotfixes for v8 specifically). This could be something they've fixed in the past with a service release.