Adobe Captivate 6 won't open

Question

Hi all
I use Adobe Captivate 6 in a corporate environment, and I'm currently experiencing issues running Adobe Captivate 6 after installing it.
For some reason when the laptop is taken off the network Adobe Captivate 6 would refuse to open at all.
Error: "Theme file copying failed. Try manually copying Adobe Captivate theme files from "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 6 x64\Gallery\Layouts\6_0\en_US" to "  \My Adobe Captivate Projects\Layouts\6_0\en_US"
I have searched all the "My Adobe Captivate Projects" folders on the drive and copied the contents from C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 6 x64\Gallery\Layouts\6_0\en_US to all the folders matxhing "My Adobe Captivate Projects" but no avail.
Adobe Captivate 6 will then immediately quit and exit; unable to open Captivate..
Any ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

There is one major problem / defect with Captivate 6 on corporate networks. Even though it is possible to change the default locations for "Published projects" and "Cache files" it is not possible to change the default location of the Themes folder.
The Themes folder is always stored under My Documents in ”My Adobe Captivate Projects” in a sub-folder called “Layouts”. The "My Adobe Captivate Projects" folder is created under My Documents no matter if you changed the default locations or not. Changing the default location for "My Adobe Captivate Projects" will indeed do just that, and any saved projects will end up in this folder no matter where you place it. Trouble is that Captivate insists on creating that same folder again under "My Documents" to store the theme files.
If you don't have access to "My Documents" when you are offline or disconnected from your network you will not be able to start Adobe Captivate 6 no matter what you do. It will fail and shut down continously and there is nothing you can do about it.
I know this because at my work our My Documents are stored in a Roaming Profile on a server. I do have access to My Documents even if I am disconnected from the network, but we have a storage restriction on the My Documents folder of 100 MB. If you exceed this then the directory will become read only (which also makes Captivate go fubar and not start). Now this is a rather big problem since the Captivate themes folder take up 162 MB, so already upon installation of Captivate my storage restriction for My Documents is exceeded.
So in my infinite wisdom I decided to just delete the theme files as I didn't plan on using them anyways, but it turns out that is not possible.. Well of course you can delete them, but every single time you open up Captivate 6 it recreates the themes in your My Documents folder and once again screws everything up. I contacted Adobe about this and was notified that there is no way around this. The themes must be placed in My Documents and if you delete the folder then Captivate will recreate it again. I later found out that you actually only need to keep "blank.cptm" and "white.cptm" but can delete all other files (provided that one of these two is set as your default theme). That means that the Themes folder will "only" take up 20 MB of space in My Documents instead of the 162 MB. This is of course better and allows me to actually use Captivate, but it's still 20 MB wasted space of my precious alotted 100 MB.
So.. If you don't have a My Documents folder when you are working offline from the network you will never get Captivate 6 to work.
In my humble opinion this is a major design defect in Captivate 6. I sincerely can't understand how such an oversight can be made when you would expect that a large percentage of the Captivate users are actually working on corporate networks. I don't really see the reasoning for hardcoding the path to the Themes folder so it is placed in My Documents regardless of what you set the default locations to. Apparently Captivate has no problem actually grabbing the files from the installation directory and recreating the folder every time you delete it, so it would have made more sense to just make Captivate read the theme files from the installation directory to begin with.
I wrote this article -   http://www.cpguru.com/setting-up-adobe-captivate-6-in-a-corporate-environment/ - back in August about the problems I had getting Captivate 6 to work on a Corporate Network. However, it won't do you any good if you do not have a My Documents folder when you are disconnected from the network unfortunately.
Sincerely,
Michael