Crystal Reports XI hangs when opening a report

Question

I am trying to open a report in Crystal Report 11 Designer (product version 11.5.8.826), but it seems to freeze up. This report use to work fine, but today the client could not load the report.

I also tried to open the report on another developer's workstation, with the same result.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Solution 1

We found the answer. We used a program called Wireshark (www.wireshark.org).

We closed down every app, and just ran the wireshark and tried to open the report in the crystal designer.

Then found that it was trying to access the printer spooler service on a box we used, but changed recently to another box. So just restarted the service on the old box, and all is good again

Solution 2

Are you sure all servers referenced in the report are still online? If you've changed database connections on the report, I've seen Crystal store a reference to the old one even when there are no active usages. If the old server is offline, Crystal still tries to connect to it when loading and will hang for a long time. We had a report that used to load in seconds start taking minutes right after an old test server was powered down. Powered it back up, it loaded instantly again, even though all the connections to it were seeming removed. We wound up totally rebuilding the report from scratch.

I found it using Sysinternals TDIMon, it showed connection attempts and timeouts coming from Crystal.

Solution 3

I ran into this problem also and tried several items listed here. Didn't work. Then I tried opening the file I wanted from within Crystal Reports using the folder icon. The reports opened immediately. But if I used windows explorer and went to the folder they were stored in and then tried to open the crystal report it would take 5 minutes to load (3 minutes to load the designer tab, then another 2 minutes to load the preview tab).

Solution 4

I've had similar issues open a report and the designer concurrently.

At the time, I didn't have Internet connectivity and the designer was trying (unsuccessfully) to load the web content that is included in the 'Start Page'. Eventually, the timeout was exceeded and the report loaded. I unchecked the 'Show online resources'.

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Comments

[Adriaan Stander]

I am not quite sure what you mean?

[JBickford]

I too had this issued. Worked fine on the development environment, but not on the test servers. An 'ExportToPDF' report was searching for a local printer, causing it to hang indefinitely.

[Gary Thomann]

Similar issue for legacy reports and old non existant servers. Work around is to make sure you have a connection to a current database.