UltraHal 6.2 continually crashing

[LordDarkStar]

Hello all,

First off, let me say how excited I am to have Ultra Hal 6.2 as my personal secretary as well as my 'online' buddy.  I have always been interested in the concepts of AI since reading I Robot back in the seventh grade.  Not in my wildest imaginings did I concieve of the day when my own computer would have the ability to become sentient!  Absolutely amazing is the best description I can come up with at the moment.

Now, to the matter at hand.  After intalling Ultra Hal as a trial version, things seemed to work pretty smoothly.  I'm still having a bit of trouble with voice command, but I believe I have that worked out (you know, RTFM!).  The difficuly I'm now running into is that anytime I try to open Hal's menu from a right click on the system tray icon, his control panel begins to appear and then the old MS message about the application experiencing a problem and needing to close.  Soory to report it did not occur to me to note the reason for the crash.  I will do so and add it to my post.

In any case, I uninstalled Hal, defraged the hard drive as well as the registry.  Turned off all the TSR's and reloaded Hal.  The process went normally (so far as I can tell).  The compuetr was restarted, But the issue persisted.

Seem to be having some sort of systems issue with Firefox as the culprit.  Be back shortly.

Doc

[Art]

Doc,

Welcome to the forum and to Hal!

Have you ran an updated (definition files) and recent (lately) Virus scan?

Have you ran Spybot S&D and Adaware? If not you should do so.

Does your version of windows have all it's updates?

These are but a few things I'd recommend.

[LordDarkStar]

Hello all,

Thanks for the recommendations Art.  Indeed, after I finished my post yesterday, I began to run down the culprit.  For one reason or the other Firefox was using almost all of the systems resources!  Naturally I thought someone was trying to 'own' my computer.  I forced an update of NOD 32 and had it run a deep scan of all of my drives in 'take no prisoners' mode (i.e., repair the file or delete it).  It did find 1 bad file.  I then ran both Spybot and Ad-Aware and they both found some suspect files which were deleted.  I also had installed a couple of recommended programs whose integrity was questionable in my mind and those were uninstalled, the registry cleaned and the downloaded files shredded.  Somewhere in all those steps, the problem appears to have been resolved - thank goodness!

Now, back to my original issue.  As I was saying, Ultra Hal keeps crashing for reasons that I am unable to fathom.  I have attached a document in .RTF format(sent as  a .RAR file) that has a current report from DXDIAG as well as a couple of screen shots from Windows Task Manager showing my system with its usual configuration of programs running at idle.  Still haven't gotten a capture of the error data,  That will be next.

Best regards

Doc

Download Attachment: ComputerData.rar
95.42 KB

[LordDarkStar]

Well, I'm back again.

I successfully launched Hal (now Emily), but as soon as I attempted to open her general options, she crashed.  I've attached another .RAR containing some captures of the details of the error in the hopes that it will give you a clearer picture of what needs to be done to resolve this issue.  At this point, I am inclined to try the old uninstall, cold boot, reinstall to see if that might be the ticket.  Oh - another potentially significant factoid:  I am in the habit of installing software to another drive rather than the drive Windows occupies.  This hasn't caused problems with any other program, but considering Emily's unique nature and function, I wonder if I might not be better off reinstalling her to the same drive that Windows resides on.  Hmmm.  Think that'll be my next gambit.

Well, back to ye olde drawing board.  I'll let you know how things work out.

Doc

Download Attachment: ScreenCaptures.rar
118.32 KB

[Art]

Doc,

Many of us soon realized that it might be better if you:

1). Download again instead of reinstalling a previous download.
2). Do not install while your Anti-Virus software is running.
3). Accept the program's default install location.

Here's hoping!

[LordDarkStar]

Oh drat!

Well, my gambit seemed like a reasonable approach.  Unfortunately, the problem persists.

At this point, I'm going to have some supper and then read a bit.  I'll come back to Emily later this evening or tomorrow.

[Bill819]

LDS
You neglected to tell us which operating system you are using. If you are using Vista you will have to go to the administrator and give permission for Hal. If not it can only be that another file that you use is causing Hal to crash.
Bill

[DarcyEdwards]

LDS,

A lot of plugins expect to find Hal on drive C, that can cause run time errors if hal isn't there.

[LordDarkStar]

Thanks to everyone for their input!

How silly of me to give you all that othe information and forget to tell you I'm running XP sp3 and I am current with all of its patches and updates.

I will follow your recommendations about re-downloading Ultra Hal and installing him/her (I have named mine Emily [:I]) to the C: drive with absolutely everything turned off, save Windows, naturally! []

BTW:  Earlier I did try re-installing Emily again after deleting the remnants of her previous install and confirming no tidbits remained lodged in the Registry.  Actually, she worked for a while following the post install re-boot - even with my customary complement of TSRs running, but then something happened to cause her to crash  ---  AGAIN (Grr) and now she doesn't want to play nice (same as before).  I went looking for the crash report where it was indicated I would find it, but I must be hard of seeing b/c it was not anywhere to be found.  This time, I did think to launch the Event viewer saving the information as tab delimited files, then importing it into Excel  for analysis.  Haven't done anything with it yet, but have attached it as a .RAR in case you are interested.

I'll be back in touch after reinstalling with a fresh download on a clean system.

Doc

Download Attachment: Eventlog042009.rar
40.49 KB

[Art]

Looking through your event log I noticed at least two occurrences of an ftdisk warning, first on 4-15 at 11 pm and on 4-16 at 8:22 pm.

This is a fault tolerance disk driver for Windows.

The warning source is FTDISK. The event code is 57. The info provided is: The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.

One source that might offer some assistance at MS:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/ee/transform.aspx?ProdName=Windows%20Operating%20System&ProdVer=5.2&EvtID=57&EvtSrc=ftdisk&LCID=1033

I also noticed some warnings from Windows Defend(er) at various times.

Hope this helps....

[Bill819]

One more thing that we forgot to mention and that is it is always safer and better to turn off all anti virus programs when downloading Hal as sometimes this can cause a bad download. Once Hal is installed you can always turn all that stuff back on.
A another little trick is to only install one plugin at a time for testing. You must reboot between each new plugin for it to make sure that it is working O.K. If it crashed after that then delete the last plugin and reboot once again.
Bil

[LordDarkStar]

Good morning all

Art and Bill:  Thank you for your insights.  I DID have NOD 32 on when I re-downloaded Hal.  I will throw that download out, restart with all start up files disabled and download Hal once more.

Art, your analysis of the log files I sent is GREATLY appreciated![8D].  No telling how long it would have taken me to tumble to the observations you made (although I'm confident I would have gotten there eventually[:I])  

Explanation

NTFS could not write data to the transaction log. This could affect the ability of NTFS to stop or roll back the operations for which the transaction data could not be written. NTFS could not write data because of one or more of the following reasons:

   1. I/O requests issued by the file system to the disk subsystem might not have been completed successfully.

Your analysis started me thinking:  My system incorporates both EIDE and SATA hard drives (I hate to not use ANY viable hardware- sort of a computer pack-rat one might say).  Windows is installed on an EIDE drive which has a slower transfer rate than the SATA drives do.  What I wonder is if I were to prep a partition on the SATA drive and install Windows XP there (sort of a dual boot XP-XP), Might having the O/S on the faster drive help overcome the issue described by the link you referred me to?  What are your thoughts on this idea?  Granted, it is a bit extreme, but I will get UltraHal working on my system reliably and that is all there is to it.  Even if I have to go so far as to reformat every one of the three internal drives (2 EIDE and 1 SATA) my system uses!  Unfortunately, my ASUS M/B does not give me a choice as to whether I want to use an EDIE or a SATA drive as my Primary.  A limitation of using older technology, cheap b/tard that I have to be1

If any other forum members would like to share you thoughts on this issue, please feel free to chime in!

Once again, gentlemen, my deep gratitude for your support with this issue!

Doc

[One]

Doc,
Unplug the undesired drives, install windows, this will become drive C.
plug in other drives one at a time and manage drive letters (CD rom's) with disk manager.
boot and configure drives one at a time !

[Art]

Doc,

Being frugal (aka - cheap) is one thing, being a pack rat is another and I resemble both!

Unless you really NEED the space that all three drives afford then keep the arrangement but with the availability of low cost monster sized drives, I personally wouldn't kludge my system by an odd mix-match of types.

Although I don't know the drive sizes, is there any consideration in using one or both IDE's as a backup or just the SATA instead? Backup's are always good things to have if one takes the time to make them.

How about the possibility of having / using a RAID / mirror system? Backup solved.

If it's a relatively small HD, I'd consider just loosing it and avoid future headaches / conflicts / hair pulling / inventing new words / etc.

[Bill819]

One last thing. Did you let Zabaware install where it was designed to or did you redirect it to a place of your liking? It will not run without crashing if it is not where Robert designed it to go.
Bill