My copy of RH7 has gone goofy...

Question

Hi everyone--
I had been using a trial copy of RH7, and it had been working
FINE. I bought a license, then when I entered my new serial number,
it started misbehaving. Two things I have found so far are as
follows:
(1) A newly created project will not open. In RH7 I created
a new HTML Help project. I saw the status messages as new files
were generated, but when it got to the point of actually opening
the project, RH7 hung. The title bar went "Not Responding" and I
had to kill the program. All files appear to have been created.
Subsequent attempts to open this project repeat this behavior i.e.
RH hanging and going Not Responding.
However... while still in trial mode (before I got my serial
number), creating a new project worked perfectly. Also, after
entering the serial number, I went back to that same project to
keep working, and it opened just fine. The problem area seems to be
only that a project newly created after entering a serial number
cannot open.
(2) Cannot insert an image using the Insert Image dialog. I
click the Insert Image icon, follow the dialog to navigate and
select the image, click OK and go back to the Insert Image dialog
-- there IS NO image selected, and "(No preview)" shows in the
image preview area.
I tried this several times, in different topics and with
different images. I can manually enter the IMG tag just fine in the
HTML code. Also, if the image has already been used elsewhere in
the project, I can successfully select it from the "Images in
Project Folders" nav tree. What seems to be broken is selecting an
image from the Browse button next to the Image name field at the
top of the dialog.
Questions:
Have these issues been seen by anyone else, either in a fresh
copy of RH7 or a trial version that got a serial number?
I checked for patches; found none.
I have not yet tried uninstalling, then reinstalling the
download file I got with my purchase (corporate purchasing obtained
a fresh copy of the software) - but will do so after checking for
replies here.
My PC has Windows XP SP2, if that matters.
Thanks for any tips or insight...
~Kathy.

Answer 1

Testing results.
Oh boy, where to begin.... I do think I've found a bug or
two, actually, in the problems I've reported here.
Before I started testing, I uninstalled RH7, uninstalled X5
(making sure I had a copy saved of the v502 update!), and cleaned
up anything robo I could find in the registry. (The support case I
opened told me what registry items to clean up.) Then installed RH7
again from the newer version of the install files supplied to me by
my corporate software contact.
The "create new project and RH goes Not Responding" problem.
I can create this at will, or avoid it at will. Either in
trial mode or with the serial number entered.
The difference is whether I create the new project on my C:
drive or on a mapped server drive. (A departmental policy is
that we don't do work on our C: drive, all "official" copies of
project work is stored on our server, which is backed up
regularly... So at the time I first posted, I hadn't tried C:.)
Wondering if the filepath might be a problem, I tried short folder
names, long folder names, 7 levels of nested subfolders, spaces or
no spaces in the folder names, 100+characters total for the
filepath, etc... on both C: and mapped drives. And consistently I
found that I can always create a new project just fine on the C:
drive, but when creating to a mapped drive RH hangs.
When RH does hang in this case, I noticed that only 46 files
are getting created, not the usual 49. The missing ones are:
-- Flash Help Pro.ssl
-- Flash Help.ssl
-- Microsoft HTML Help.ssl
So that sums up that issue. It's not exactly an acceptable
problem (and X5 didn't do this), but it can be worked around by
creating a project on C: then copying it over to a mapped drive to
continue working.
The "browse to select image file not retaining file name"
issue.
This one is weird. Originally it seemed that the problem was
specific to certain files. I don't know what made those particular
images any different from the other couple dozen I'd been playing
with, other than they are screen captures all created on a certain
date, on another PC, by another writer. Oh, and their file names
are the longest of all my images.
But.. long file names? That gave me an idea. I copied the
files and gave them shorter names, and then the problem went away.
Hmm. I started moving my test projects around to different
locations. C drive or mapped drive on a server. Short vs. long
folder name locations, nested levels of subfolders or not --
And it turns out that there seems to be a maximum number of
characters in the physical filepath to the image plus the image's
file name itself where the Select Image File dialog poops out. 120
characters, to be exact.
No matter that the IMG tag is a relative reference to where
the topic file is... Apparently, however the Select Image dialog is
coded, it must be using a physical reference when navigating to
find a file. And if the filepath + image file name exceeds 120
characters, it can't bring back the file name to the Insert Image
dialog.
I don't know if this is a bug or an intended feature (after
all, 120 characters is quite long!!)... but it certainly can affect
the portability of a project.
So that sums up the "insert image" issue.
Also~
While going back and forth between projects on C: drive
locations and mapped drive locations, I noticed that the Insert
Image dialog does not always give you the "right" project directory
at first. Rather, it remembers the location of the last image you
added, even if that was in a different project and even if RH had
been closed since the last time you added an image. RH X5 is still
off my pc so at the moment I can't check to see if this was prior
behavior as well. So I have to remember to always pull down the
"Look in" dropdown (in the Select Image File dialog) to verify
where my dialog is 'pointing to' before I select an image to add.
Hope these posts have been an interesting read, and if anyone
else does see these same problems or wants to test them out for
yourself, I'd like to hear from you!