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

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05-06-2022 10:08 AM
wayfaringrob
Frequent Contributor

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?

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6 Replies
Robert_LeClair
Esri Notable Contributor

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!

wayfaringrob
Frequent Contributor

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.

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wayfaringrob
Frequent Contributor

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.

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RhettZufelt
MVP Frequent Contributor

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.....

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wayfaringrob
Frequent Contributor

No, not at all unfortunately.

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Robert_LeClair
Esri Notable Contributor

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.

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