Disappeared LBC?

[oblivion]

LBC has been a staple on my laptop for ages. Used always as a menu minimised to the tray, it's a collection of my most used shortcuts and is completely embedded in my workflow.

Until yesterday.

It's gone away. It's running, I can see it in task manager, but I can't make it appear - no tray icon, the -options switch doesn't work (nor does -exit).

I've rerun the installer. No change.

Next is a full ripout and reinstall, followed by portable mode, but I figured I should post something here in case...

The most recent system changes have been Intel graphics driver updates and an accompanying (and over intrusive) Arc game mode thingy that I've stopped auto starting but not yet removed. And an update from Listary 5 to 6. Either could be implicated.

I'll let you know when I get LBC working again and if I can identify the culprit.

That aside, merry Christmas! 

[mouser]

It used to be that you could use the ctrl+alt+shift+L hotkey to bring LBC up if it was moved off screen by a monitor resolution change or something similar, but i don't know when that stopped working.
Let me check into it and remind myself of the commandline options and such..

LBC does automatically keep some backups, so the first thing might be to find these backups, in the directory where your launchbar is, and preserve them.

[oblivion]

LBC does automatically keep some backups, so the first thing might be to find these backups, in the directory where your launchbar is, and preserve them.

-mouser (December 27, 2022, 06:08 AM)

Hi, and thanks for such a quick comeback during the festive season!

I've got LBC back again, after a fashion, and I think I've found what's broken.

I have an old MCF file that I was able to make work after I'd deleted the ini files and everything else.

The broken thing seems to be an MCP file.

The Options allows a path to the project file to be set, but although I have two backups, they're both datestamped 24/12 and if I rename one of them to match the one in use -- having exited and backed up the working one first -- I get the previous behaviour of no LBC etc.

So the backups are over 20Mb. The in use one is 2.15K.

What do MCP files do? The new one just looks like text, but the huge older ones have text and binary content, by the look of things -- likely corruption, perhaps?

Annoyingly, I don't have a backup MCF that I can find, dated later than May 2020. But at least I have a working LBC again!

I'm going to reinstall Listary now and see if that was a coincidence!

[elbitjusticiero]

The exact same thing is happening to me, so it's not a corrupt file. I guess some Windows update is the culprit. (I'm using Windows 10.)

LBC appears ticked in Startup Apps, but it's classified as "High Impact", which means that it takes too long to start.

Every time I reboot my computer I need to run LBC manually and then dock it.

[mouser]

LBC data files (MCF) can get very big because LBC stores icon image data in them even at image sizes that it doesn't really need.  There is an option to clean up and minimize the use of image data in the Tools -> Maintenance menu.
The MCP should be tiny, they essentially just tell LBC what MCF file(s) were open and have some general options.

So, all your tree data is in an MCF file, which should be automatically backed up by LBC when you make changes.
And then the MCP files hold very little of value.  If you lost your MCP file you would just start LBC and tell it to open the MCF which has all your data in it.


LBC should be auto creating backups regularly of your MCF files, so it's distressing if it wasn't. 

----

I apologize for the delay in getting to this.  If you still have an old MCF file with your latest nodes but its not visible, can you confirm this -- and let me know what happens when LBC launches or when you try to File -> Open it.. Does LBC complain or just not show on the screen.  I will add some code now to try to fix up things if LBC finds itself off screen, which I suspect may be the problem.