Dreamweaver crashes/freezes when doing find in site

Question

When I use "find" it works fine for a single document but, if I choose "find next" after setting the search to the entire site (or a folder), it performs the search and starts to bring up the correct file, then it crashes.  Behavior is the rainbow wheel of death indefinitately.  I have to force quit and restart.
I have reproduced this about a dozen times.
I quit DW, trashed my cache file, emptied the trash, and restarted.  This has made no change.  I have no add-ons of any kind.
I have quit out of other programs and run DW with plenty of RAM available.  When it freezes I look in Activity Monitor and can see that RAM is still very available and CPU usage is high, but not excessive.  The DW program is unavailable.  I've tried waiting out the freeze but it doesn't end.
So far, I have had no problems with DW doing other things.  Not even when I open 20+ files at once and available RAM is a tiny sliver.  In that case, I get freezes that last a few seconds, and the program is slow, but everything still works.
I searched extensively for other reports of this bug and found nothing about the find feature but that CS5.5 seems to be unstable and crashes a lot.  Some reports have linked crashes to using FTP so I tried running find without first using FTP and it makes no difference.
I need to update a website with hundreds of pages and it's really untenable to search for broken links and outdated text by hand.
Running CS5.5.  I just got this a couple weeks ago but I previously ran CS3 and could use find in the entire site (the same site actually) just fine.
I have an iMac 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2.5GB RAM.  Running OS 10.5.8.
I've got to have this feature working.  Please help.
Thanks,
Cyndi

Answer 1

Murray *ACP* wrote:
Hmmm...doing some tests limiting the search to certain subfolders or to selected files.  It seems the find function is working fine until it gets to a particular file.  There are several such files.  It starts to open that file then I get the rainbow wheel of death without end.  When I force quit and relaunch, Dreamweaver remembers this file as the last one opened.  I can open any of these files no problem (either from the splashpage or directly from the site directory) and I can search within them without incident.
What is the search string you are using?  Have you tried making fragments of those files to see if you can identify the block of code that causes the freeze?
Besides, I can't imagine it would be a good idea to switch back and forth between different versions of the same program.  There is not just one term I need to search for.  This is an ongoing project.
It woudn't make any difference at all to use CS3 for this.
Okay, so here's the question, what is causing find to hang like this?  It's not something stopping the file from opening or being searched.  I will gladly remove any bad code or whatever it might be, but some of these files are huge (like 100 pages if printed).  I'm fixing code DW is marking as bad but that doesn't seem to be enough.
Yes, that is the question!  I have no idea, but sounds like you are on the right path to finding out....
In the DW Reports panel, there is a tab called "LINK CHECKER".
Under "Site: Reports..." there is no link checker anywhere.  I found nothing else called reports.
What is the search string you are using?
A variety of things: lanmind, lmi.net, lye, chemical.
Have you tried making fragments of those files to see if you can identify the block of code that causes the freeze?
I just tried it.  I took one of the smaller affected files (I tested as many as I could (it only will cause a freeze if the search term appears in the file) and found 8 "bad" files) and broke it into two halves, using the same header and footer for each.  The original filename is y.htm.  I broke it into y-test-1 and y-test-2.  1 was fine, 2 was bad.  I then broke 2 into two files, y-test-3 and y-test-4.  And they're both okay!!  WTH.
I noticed that the source code had some bolded text.  It shouldn't be bold there, just in the display, and it was pretty random.  But there were 3 parts to the file (annotated links) with some bolded source text.  These appeared in y-test-4.  I used save-as to create the test files, not cut and paste.  Yet y-test-4 does not freeze up.
When I deleted the 3 annotated links from y-test-2, it stopped freezing when being pulled up during a search (I highlight one or more files, making sure they are not already open, and choose "Find in: Selected files in site").  I deleted them one at a time and it wasn't until I deleted the last one that it made a difference.  Then I put back the first two and left the third one out.  And the file is okay.
But I still can't figure out why.  There is random bolded source code in most of the files (all?), including those that don't give me any trouble.  There are some weird symbols in this link, but they exist in other files that are fine.  Hmmm...maybe not so fine.  I'm now deliberately trying files using keywords that I know are in there.  As opposed to looking for the outdated domain names like before.
It would really help if someone could give me a list of "bad" symbols or something.  And what does the bolded text mean?  And yes this is a BUG on Dreamweaver's part.  The files open just fine and they display fine in Firefox.  I can use the "find all" function when doing a sitewide search, even the "bad" files will be listed correctly, and then open the files manually.  If the "bad" file is open, I can search within it no problem.  The only thing I can't do is a sitewide (or selected files) search on files that are not open.  The "bad" ones will cause Dreamweaver to freeze as they automatically open.
So yes, I've found a workaround, but that doesn't mean there isn't a bug and that I don't want it fixed.  And the website I'm updating is really old with a lot of the work done in 1999.  It's for a nonprofit, it's very very important to keep the pages mostly as is, and I'm taking over from someone who recently passed away.  I am revamping things considerably, but, aside from fixing outdated links, I need to work with what's there and keep a "legacy" version.  I'm porting the info to a blog format but it will take months.  (And yes, this particular link is not important but it's the example I have to work with.)
The bad section of code is:
<LI><B><I>UTNE Reader's Y2K Guide</I></B><BR>
<UL> <A HREF="http://www.utne.com/bY2k.tmpl$search?db=dArticle.db&eqheadlinedata=Y2K%20Citizen%27s%20Act ion%20Guide">http://www.utne.com/bY2k.tmpl$search?db=dArticle.db&eqheadlinedata=Y2K%20Citizen%27s%20Act ion%20Guide</A></UL>
I'm hoping that doesn't break anything and that it comes out okay.  You can see the page on the website here: http://ehnca.org/www/ehnlinx/y.htm
There are dollar signs elsewhere that seem to be okay but I'm not sure.  That seems to be the only weirdness I can find.
Any comments?  Are dollar signs (in links, not in text) bad?  I tried another file and found only one dollar sign in it in a link.  I removed it, saved and closed the file, and did a search on it.  And it froze.  So if dollar signs are bad, then they aren't the only things.
Help!
Thanks.