I don’t normally broadcast the many bugs I find but the consequences of this are severe enough to warrant planting a caution flag.
I stumbled into a way to break Windows, using ArcGIS Pro without any special manoeuvres or contortions.
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DON’T DO THIS:
- On launch select “Start without a template”, followed by:
- Save project, and choose the project’s Home Folder to save within
(instead of browsing ‘This PC’ to someplace sensible)
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SYMPTOMS
- Pro window stays open but doesn’t respond. It can be force closed.
- Eventually Windows becomes sluggish doing certain things, and some programs crash with no error, but otherwise operates more or less as usual for days.
Things get bad when the user signs out or restarts the system:
- After reboot, sign in takes half a minute plus, and then desktop is non functional: flashing screen, only Start button and task bar visible, all else black.
- Ctrl-Alt-Delete to access emergency menu and signing out works.
- An alternate user can sign in successfully, and Windows appears to function normally.
- Using Microsoft repair tools such as System File Checker (SFC) and Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DSIM) are not successful in repairing the system, though they may report success.
- Backing up the computer will probably fail (depends on tool used and whether it images hard drive or copies files).
WHAT HAPPENED
“Start without a template” opens a project with it’s Home Folder set inside the user profile TEMP folder. On save Pro copies contents of this temp folder into the new saved location. If the user saves the new project inside the Home Folder an infinite loop is created, where destination is inside the source.
Pro creates recursive folders until reaching NTFS file system max limit until user force closes the unresponsive program or it finally crashes. Any program which attempts to traverse or manipulate that file tree will probably crash. This includes Windows Explorer.
Verify this bug has happened by inspecting contents of Pro temp folders in the user profile. Example:
C:\Users\mhwilkie\AppData\Local\Temp\ArcGISProTemp36464\Untitled\try2\try2\try2\try2...
REMEDY
There is a small and clean solution. It is not necessary to restore a previous system image or back up.
- Sign in as alternate user with administrative privileges to the machine and ability to take ownership of other users’ files.
- Open a Powershell console and use rmdir command. Do not use Command Prompt (cmd.exe), it will crash. Be patient, the process can take a long time (over 20 minutes on my machine).
rmdir C:\Users\AFFECTED_ACCOUNT\AppData\Local\Temp\ArcGISProTemp*
Esri has confirmed the bug. If you wish to follow its progress login into My Esri and navigate to Support > Bugs and Enhancements > BUG-000158898.
This affects at least Pro 3.0 and 3.1, the two versions I tested. I suspect this reaches back to when the “Start without template” feature was first introduced in v2.3.
