Do you have Project Pro (desktop) crashes daily? We do.

[Matt Kennedy]

We have an ongoing problem of Project Pro crashing requiring that any oepn
projects be "checked in". This happens almost daily to some and on some
regular basis to all. Do others have this same problem and just live with it?
I've not seen much in here written about this.

I am the PS administrator and have to use PWA to force a check-in of peoples
projects in regularly that is why I am so aware of this. The problem is (it
happens to me as well) that project crashes without warning and not always
when you are doing the same thing. You get the old dialog asking if you want
to send an error report to microsoft or not and then it restarts project.
This obviosuly requires then doing a forced checkin of any plans that were
open when this happened. This happens at least once a day to me personally
and sometimes more. We've all learned to save frequently so there is not a
lot of lossed productivity but I am concerned that it is giving project
server a bad rap (this wasn't happening prior to our transition to project
server a few months ago). I have had the system manager run the various tools
in the resource kit to determine if any project server tuning is required and
have also had the networks team verify that there was no network "hiccup" at
that particular time. We really feel like we have no where else to go with
this at this point.

Do others experience this same behavior in your installations? Is this
somthing we'll just have to live with? Any ideas on things we can do to
proactively track this down?

Thanks!
-Matt

 

[Matt Kennedy]

I should have mentioned we are all using Windows XP SP1 and Project
Professional 2003 SP1.

 

[Rod Gill]

As you are doing the check-in, does this mean you are using project Server
2002?

Are you connecting directly to Project Server from Project Pro or via
Terminal Services or Citrix?

What quality/performance network do you have? You could try downloading an
eval copy of PingPlotter (http://www.pingplotter.com/) to look at your
network, especially immediately after a crash (leave PingPlotter running).
This will either point the finger at a bad network or eliminate it from the
equation. We are interested in latency and data errors. I know the network
team has checked for no major hiccups, but a sudden burst of data errors
with high latency could cause problems and PingPlotter (or equivalent) will
highlight them very quickly.

You're right, this problem hasn't appeared in the group so it is very rare.
I run a reasonably large system at the moment and haven't had it happen
once.

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Matt:

Having done nothing but Project Pro and Server installations for the last
four years, I can tell you with certainty that this is not normal. Given
that this is happening across numerous machines, indicates a system problem
pointing to your desktop build or a network or server issue. You should
first look for commonality among the machines exhibiting this behavior that
might explain first.

 

[Matt Kennedy]

Thankyou for the replies. Good to hear this is not a "typical" behavior with
PS. Rod I will look into the pingplotter tool you suggest. Thanks.

 

[JWF]

If you're running windows XP SP1, you need to install MDAC 2.8 or
above to get it working correctly with Project Server 2003.

Hope this helps
Jason