Digital Light & Color

Had a strange experience today with the new (to me) PWP 5.0. It may never occur again. But if it does, I'd like to know an easier solution than the drastic one to which I finally resorted.

I created a mask and, leaving it "active" on the image, did a Brightness Curve transformation. After clicking OK on the Brightness Curve transformation which created a new image in a new window, I tried to close the mask function. PWP wouldn't allow me to do that. Since that has happened to me before (with 5.0 but never with 4.0) I implemented the solution that has worked previously.

I clicked OK on the mask tool and created an actual mask image in a new window. As on previous occasions, this allowed me to close the mask tool.

But this is the point where things got weird. PWP wouldn't let me close the window with the mask. I got a message that said it couldn't be closed because it was still in use by an "Amount Mask". I saved the mask image. PWP still wouldn't let me close the mask image window. I closed every transformation and all other open image windows and was still not permitted to close the mask image. I tried to close the entire PWP application and was not permitted to do that as long as the window that I was not permitted to close remained open.

The final solution was to effect a shut-down of my whole computer. I, of course, got a warning that, with an application remaining open, I might lose data. But that was OK since I just wanted this nightmare to end. It did! And after rebooting, PWP opened clean and the mask image window was FINALLY gone.

What should I have done to avoid the necessity of a total computer shutdown?

Doug, did you try to shut PWP down with the Taskmanager?
(Right click in the Taskbar, there you can open the Taskmanager, then go to index Applications, right click on PWP and you can end it).
Should close down almost every wierd acting application.

Thanks for the suggestion Dieter. Another Forum member sent me the same hint via e-mail.

I didn't think about that option due to having intermittent success with Task Manager on my old Windows XP operating system [just moved to new computer and Windows 7 since Christmas]. Often with the old system I would try Ctrl-Alt-Del [Task Manager] whenever I got a "Application Not Responding" message. And about 80% of the time "End Task" had no effect. Of course, Task Manager also told me that "CPU Usage" was 100% (lol).

I guess that was my old computer telling me that it's time was past -- a signal I ignored for more than a year. Perhaps computers should be built with automatic DNR (do not recussitate) orders.

Try this app (a single Windows .exe, 6kb) instead of Task Manager to kill a process that stopped responding:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv ... askill.exe

The Windows 7 command-line tools provided with the system include taskkill.exe (type taskkill /? for all the options) that make terminating PWP by name easy: taskkill /F /IM pw50.exe That will terminate (/F = forcefully) all the processes with name pw50.exe.

PWP often starts multiple copies of itself, even when no workflow window is open (doing the actual image prcessing in a separate process makes the main application more responsive, I suppose). E.g. starting PWP with no image windows shows this in Microsoft's Sysinternals ProcessExplorer: