topic Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue in ArcGIS Pro Questions

ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

wayfaringrob — Fri, 06 May 2022 17:08:07 GMT

Ever since I started using Pro, which at this point, has been on a number of machines, multiple versions, and a few different orgs, I get this issue where every command is grayed out, including the exit button, and the cursor is spinning. It usually goes away after a few moments, but occasionally (right now!) it goes on for much longer, usually when doing something routine like validating a join or querying something that normally only takes seconds. It doesn't really indicate progress on those kinds of things, either, so it's actually hard to tell what's causing it or what it's thinking about. I cannot Ctrl+W/Alt-F4, either. I just have to wait or force quit and lose changes if they haven't autosaved. Which is a monumental improvement from the much more frequent and catastrophic "ArcMap.exe has encountered an error and needs to close" warnings, but I can't find a rhyme or reason. It's still frequent enough, though, that I feel something should or could be done - performance-wise, ArcGIS Pro continues to be by far the least reliable program that I use on a daily basis. And I use Office 2013!

I'm curious if anyone has ever been able to find a persistent cause and solution to this? To me, it just seems random, so I don't think tech support would be much help. Curious to hear from others though. How do you work around this?

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

Robert_LeClair — Fri, 06 May 2022 17:17:45 GMT

Not sure what would cause this issue but there are a few things you can do to troubleshoot it.

1. Run the Diagnostic Monitor to see what processes are hanging.
2. Run the ArcGIS Pro Performance Assessment Tool to see what startup times are for the application and components.
3. Rename the ESRI folder in your C:/users/<user_profile>/appdata/local and C:/users/<user_profile>/appdata/roaming to ESRI_OLD.
4. Run a Repair (or clean uninstall/reinstall) of ArcGIS Pro to see if that addresses the issue.
5. Run the "Can your computer run ArcGIS Pro 2.8. and ArcGIS 2.9? tool.

Hope this helps!

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

wayfaringrob — Fri, 06 May 2022 17:49:13 GMT

Thank you. If Diagnostic Monitor has to be enabled before an issue happens, that's not going to be very useful for an issue that surfaces unpredictably, unfortunately. I'll try 2 but I'm not sure what you're suggesting that will do for me. The issue isn't that things always take a long time or that I don't know about how long things take on my machine; it's that they intermittently cause a severe lockup. Repeating what I believe caused a long lockup once typically doesn't do it again.

The other suggestions, clearing settings and reinstalling, may show a change, but that would be a long-term 'wait-and-see' approach, and like I said, I have faced this issue on multiple machines, multiple accounts, and multiple versions (since about 1.3), along with anecdotal reports from friends and colleagues experiencing the same. Though Pro is markedly more stable, I don't have a whole lot of faith that that's going to be worth it, especially when ArcGIS Desktop has a notorious reputation for poor performance.

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

wayfaringrob — Fri, 06 May 2022 18:43:22 GMT

Here we go. I'm not sure what it tells me. The Tasks and Log tabs are empty, but the map has been loading for nearly 10 minutes. This doesn't happen every time.

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

RhettZufelt — Fri, 06 May 2022 19:07:58 GMT

Are you using SDE through VPN by any chance?

Looks like you have a lot of maps with a lot of layers that need to load.

Have seen it take forever to just load a few layers from SDE through VPN. In the meantime, just sits and spins.

Just a thought.....

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

wayfaringrob — Fri, 06 May 2022 19:03:41 GMT

No, not at all unfortunately.

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

Robert_LeClair — Fri, 06 May 2022 19:43:18 GMT

I did find a case where a customer was experiencing exceptionally slow ArcGIS Pro performance and the support analyst went through everything (some of which is in this thread). No joy - slow. The resolution was to create a new user profile on the computer in question and that resolved the issue. Not exactly sure why but it worked.

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

HallvardSkrede — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 20:07:06 GMT

I get the same issue with every function/button greyed out whenever I add a legend in layouts.

Usually it freezes from 1 to 10 minutes depending on how many layers etc. I have added in the project, very frustrating,. And I just have to wait for it to finish up 😕

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

wayfaringrob — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 23:10:05 GMT

Yep. This persists for me as well to this day, on new machines, virtual machines, student machines, computer lab machines, etc -- just a widespread issue on every device I've ever run Pro on. ArcMap has its own unresponsiveness problems, but I thought Pro was supposed to fix that...

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

Robert_LeClair — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 22:31:40 GMT

Are you running ArcGIS Pro in a Citrix environment?

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

wayfaringrob — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 20:00:33 GMT

Never have, no.

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

Robert_LeClair — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 16:19:24 GMT

Thank you the response. In studying this issue, let's try a few more things.

1. Clear the Local Cache in the Options->Display tab, click the Clear cache now button and perhaps check the "Clear cache each time the application closes" box. Maybe try a different rendering engine radio button on the same tab - it defaults to DirectX 12. Try DirectX 11 or Open GL.
2. Use a different basemap in the layout (strange I know, but it worked for another customer).
3. Do you have XTools installed? If so, remove/delete this Add-In.
4. Update the graphic card drivers.

Let me know if any of these suggestions improves ArcGIS Pro performance.

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

HallvardSkrede — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 12:42:25 GMT

Yes, we have switched from "Citrix" to "Azure", but the issue remains... 😕

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

MichelleCMiciunas — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:04:53 GMT

ugh, been experiencing this same thing in many of my Projects over the last few days, it's maddening! Something as simple as checking a box to turn off/on a layer in the Contents causes the spinning wheel of death for 5+ minutes. 😖

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

Robert_LeClair — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:21:09 GMT

Sorry to hear you're experiencing the spinning wheel of death. I've been reviewing the internal support cases related to this issue and it did a similar case. A user saw this issue when updating ArcGIS Pro from an earlier release, say 3.2.1 directly to 3.3.1 they saw this latency issue.

Steps the analyst took:
"- We have tested the query on our end as well. When upgrading from version 3.2 to 3.3.1, there are two methods you can follow. If you choose to upgrade through the application, you can go to the "About" section under the project window. From there, you will see the latest version available with the patch. Clicking on the "Download Now" option will first download the main version, and then you can follow the same step to upgrade it to the latest patch.

- On the other hand, if you prefer to upgrade the application through My Esri, you will need to download the main version first (in this case, version 3.3) and then install the patch.

- Informed the user that It is important to note that installing the patch directly without downloading the main version first may cause performance issues in the application."

So long story short, I'd recommend a clean uninstall of ArcGIS Pro and a clean install of the base ArcGIS Pro, say 3.3.0 or 3.4.0. Then update the software patches and retest your workflow. I know it's a not ideal scenario but from the case I'm reading, it does fix the spinning wheel of death.

Re: ArcGIS Pro all commands grayed out, cursor spinning, cannot exit; recurring issue

MichelleCMiciunas — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:25:08 GMT

Thank you for the swift reply! I was recently on 3.2.2 and then per support tix suggestion, upgraded to 3.4.0. So. I'll install the latest patch and see if that resolves it.

My next course of action was to open a support tix.