EA just won't start...in v14, v13, v12...

[Ian Mitchell]

Recently installed 14.1, and after a while got a strange 'locking' error from EA, so thought the best plan was to de-install EA, and re-install, then see if it came back.
Did that, but when re-installed, when starting EA, the EA splash screen now shows for a fraction of a second, then nothing.
Nothing in the Windows error logs, or my anti-virus. No EA error message
Suspiciously, the re-install didn't ask the the activation code.
The went back and re-installed v13.5, V13, V12....exactly the same symptom.
As you might imagine, this is a bit of a disaster.
Anyone out there seen this one before?
(and yes, we did do machine restarts, shutdowns, registry cleans between the different stages).
Any ideas REALLY appreciated.

[Geert Bellekens]

Have you tried a system restore?
If you are on Windows 10 then it should have created a system restore point the moment you installed EA v14.1

Saved my ass this week after all of my add-ins suddenly stopped loading (and all I got from EA was a lousy hex error code)

What I would also try is to remove the EAAddins key from the registry (both from HKLM as from HKCU) to make sure no add-in is somehow causing the issue.

Geert

[Ian Mitchell]

True genius - system restore fixed it...
As part investigating this, we installed EA on the same machine under a new user account - this worked OK, and DID prompt for the activation code.
Makes be a bit worried about installing any future EA versions......

[Sunshine]

...Makes be a bit worried about installing any future EA versions......

Agree is a cause for concern. Recommend following good practices such as ensuring new versions are trialled out for a few days or weeks first on test machines first.  System restore is a wonderful safety net.

That being said to provide some level of comfort, I've not experienced many problems with installing/uninstalling Sparx EA over the last 12 years. We have to go through a rigid production testing phase before using any new versions of tools. One of the tests checks that the tools install/uninstall cleanly. Our support engineers who test this say Sparx EA is one of the better tools they tested so historically its all been good. Sounds like your experience may have been an exception. I've not heard others with this problem.

[Glassboy]

Any ideas REALLY appreciated.

There used to be a Windows installer cleaner.  Now it isn't a download, it's web page which is much harder to find.  Windows Installer caches setup files and sometimes these get corrupted.

[Ian Mitchell]

OK - just found out that it really isn't fixed....
All of the internal MDGs are missing, but copying them across to a new  EA/InternalTechnologies folder makes the system go back to the same symptom - EA tries to start, then fails. Althouh is fails a bit slower - 1-2 sec before it gives-up.
Even having just one of the built-in technology XML files makes EA fail on startup.
Also tried to point EA to a copy of these MDG XML files, from the Specialize/Technologies/Manage/Advanced, but EA doesn't like the format - probably because they are all encoded in some way, and aren't simple text.
I managed to get EA to create new repositories, but only by manually copying the eabase.* files.

I'm also back in 14.0. Which is kind-of where I started, but updating back to 14.1 looks like the only way forward.

[Geert Bellekens]

I see, the InternalTechnologies is new since v14
The files in the folder have extension .xml, but these are clearly some kind of binary format and not plain xml. (it's not simply a zipped xml file, I tried that)

Seems like these files represent the technologies that used to be hardcoded in EA.
I guess they are now loaded as any other MDG technology, except for the file format.

I'm all out of ideas on how to fix that. I hope Sparx support can help you..

Geert