RoboHelp 9 crashes during the publish of a project

Question

Greetings friends,
I am in a serious bind. I have a project that was created in Robohelp 9. I started encountering crashes on the evening of Jan 30th when attempting to publish the project.
I have been working in this same project without issue for 3 months without issue. I suspect the issue is related to some topics that were updated or created on that day.
Here is what I have tried:
1. I am able to successfully publish other projects
2. I was able publish the project in question earlier in the day. From modified times, I can deduce the batch of topics that may be involved.
The problem is there are 32 topics.
3. I have evaluated each of the 32 topics, seeing an earlier thread that referenced potential issues with tables. I did find 2 topics where the table looked a bit odd. I edited the properties on the tables and saved the topics. The issue persisted.
4. For grins, I checked the properties on the tables in each topic to be sure they matched the format in known-good topics.
5. I have tried renaming the project's .cpd file - based on other posts- the same issue occurs.
6. The project is pretty good size, so recreating it is NOT an option.
So I am stuck!
I have some questions to try to resolve this:
1. I noted in another thread that a user with a similar issue was able to publish via command line. Any suggestions on the string to use?
2. Is there a way to test this project by removing the suspect topics, then readding them one-at-a-time - aside from manually re-creating the topic in RH, then copy/paste from the original?
Any suggestions on how to achieve this goal?
3. Are there any debugging/compiling tools available to help troubleshoot this type of error? This seems like a fairly common error where topic formatting can cause trouble. It would SEEM logical that a tool would exist.
I thank you all in advance for your consideration on this!
Thanks again.
Eric Buterbaugh
Newforma, Inc.

Answer 1

To create the tag, right click a topic to which it is to be applied and click the options shown.
In this screen click New and create a tag called Exclude.
OK that and the tag is created and applied to that topic.
To apply to the others, open the Topic List pod and select them. (Use the CTRL key to make multiple selections)
Right click, select Properties and apply the tag in the Advanced tab.
Open the layout and go to Content.
Click Define to open the window shown. Exclude will be listed. Click the arrow to move it to the right. Generate the help.
With those topics excluded, it should all generate OK, in theory.
See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips
@petergrainge