GCA5 Crashed and Won't restart

[Voxnoir]

I'm getting 2 error messages. One from Microsoft.VisualBasic that begins Unhandled Exception Occurred: Add Failed. Duplicate Key Value Supplied

Then there is an error message from GCA that reads Error! An Unhandled Exception Was Encountered. GCA is Unable To Recover and Will Now End.

Both error messages go on to detail more. But does anyone have any idea what this is and how to fix it??

I already attempted computer reboot, uninstall and even a fresh GCA5 download and install. But no luck. Any help would be really appreciated. Thanks!

[Armin]

A screen shot of the Visual Basic error message would be very helpful to me in being able to possibly find and prevent that error in the future.

But, at best guess, something on your machine changed, either where GCA is installed or where it is expecting to find data. That's usually easy for me to catch and prevent crashes from, but this is obviously something that is not being caught.

However, you don't mention if the error is after GCA itself loads, and if the program is then trying to load a character when the crash happens. If it's when trying to load a character, then it may be related to a bug that was just reported recently and which should be fixed in the next release. If that's the case, after you fix the issue with the steps below, make sure you have GCA set to start with "Empty, no characters loaded" in Options. You can then try loading each character you were recently working on in turn, to find the one that's broken, send it to me, and I should be able to manually make it loadable for you.

If GCA was working fine, and then you suddenly started seeing that crash, then the character bug is the most likely culprit.

[Armin]

Now, to fix....

An uninstall doesn't completely remove all user data, including preferences and settings. This is because it's considered "bad practice" to remove user data, since users often reinstall programs.

If you installed GCA5 as "For you only" you can just delete the folder where you installed it, and it should be all cleaned up.

If you installed "For everyone" (which is the default option) then things are a bit messier, with parts of GCA in three different folders.

1. The first folder is in Program Files, which should get completely removed by uninstalling.
2. The second folder is in ProgramData, which includes all included data, such as books and images, and some stuff handled by the Updater. You can get there by copying this path (without the quotes): "%programdata%\Steve Jackson Games\GURPS Character Assistant 5" into the address bar in a file explorer window. (Or see below.)
3. The third folder is in AppData, which includes all your settings and downloaded plugins. You can get there by copying this path (without the quotes): "%appdata%\Steve Jackson Games\GURPS Character Assistant 5" into the address bar in a file explorer window. (Or see below.)

Delete *everything* inside the second and third folders to ensure you have a *really* clean uninstall before you reinstall.

Or, you can download this little program: https://misersoft.com/gca5/downloads/thecleaner.exe. (Thecleaner.exe will be included with future GCA5 installs, and will be found in the install folder. It is not there now.)

If you download thecleaner.exe, Windows will probably not let you run it at first. You'll have to click More Info and Run Anyway. (You may have to do something similar again for your anti-malware program, if that also blocks it.)

Once you run it, it should guess where GCA is installed (it will be wrong if it's not in the same folder as where GCA is installed, but it can still guess right about folders 2 and 3). It will display the folder names where GCA5 should have it's bits installed, and will tell you if they actually exist (which is how you know if it guessed right).

Assuming the folders it expects to find do exist, you can click the Remove buttons for each folder to clean out those folders.

Then try a new clean install, and hopefully GCA should run.

[Armin]

Note: IF you are comfortable manually doing some things, and IF the crash is happening while loading a character, you should be able to get GCA started without having to go to the effort of clearing out all your various data bits.

In the AppData folder mentioned above is a file called gca5.prefs. That contains your options settings. Open that in a plain text editor such as Notepad, Notepad++, or TextPad. Search for StartupMode. It will be in the [DisplayConfig] section. You can change the value there to 0, like this:

StartupMode = 0

to make GCA start without loading the last session. Save and exit. Then when you start GCA it won't start trying to load the broken character. And you can verify the character that was the problem, crash GCA, and then start GCA again without auto-loading that character over and over.

Then you can send the character to me at gca5@misersoft.com and I can try to fix it for you, and hopefully fix GCA so that issue doesn't come up in the future.