Gadgets causing Rainmeter to hang?

[silverazide]

Gadgets causing Rainmeter to hang?

[SilverAzide]

This is rare, but it can happen. It sounds like one of the Gadgets is stuck in a loop (refreshing over and over). The main culprit is the Weather Meter skin. Try the following steps.

• Exit Rainmeter (if you are not already exited).
• Open the file C:\Users\<user_name>\AppData\Roaming\Rainmeter\Rainmeter.ini with your preferred text editor. Do a search and replace and change the string Active=1 to Active=0. This will unload all skins.
• Run Rainmeter. Because no skins are active, it will open some Illustro skins (I think).
• Activate the Gadgets one at a time. If you get a freeze, that's the one that is causing problems. Exit Rainmeter and go back to the Rainmeter.ini file and set Active=0 for that skin.

Let me know which one it is. Another way to find out is (after Rainmeter hangs and you kill it) to look at the Rainmeter.log file (it will be in that same folder). At the bottom you might see the same skin refreshing over and over. You can post the log here. Once I see which it is, I can let you know how to fix it.

[phreich9]

Thanks for suggesting the way to find the culprit.
The one causing the issue is the drivemeter. All the others run and refresh properly, but when I start the drivemeter, all the gadgets and rainmeter lock up. I haven't added a drive in months, so I don't know what change caused the issue.

I am running an NVMe SSD as my system drive, and a couple of raid 5 arrays of SAS drives connected to an HP p812 raid controller in a PCI-E slot. The gadget was working fine with these less than a month ago.

[phreich9]

I have one other issue that's happening on another machine (a windows 11 pro machine). When I go into the gadget's settings, and try to edit the hwinfo64 sensor settings for the gadgets, clicking on the "List HWinfo indexes" or the "Edit HWinfo settings" links in the settings does nothing. It doesn't open the page to assign the values. On that machine I am running the latest version of hwinfo64, and have turned on the "Enable reporting to gadget" option in the sensors settings.

Any suggestions to get this working? It's an older machine running an Intel Core 2 quad Q6700 with 8GB of ram and an AMD Radeon R5 240 1GB video card, running Win 11 pro x64. The gadgets are running fine there, I just can't configure the GPU and CPU settings to show the correct sensors from HWINFO64

Do you want me to open another issue, or deal with it here?

[SilverAzide]

I have one other issue that's happening on another machine (a windows 11 pro machine). When I go into the gadget's settings, and try to edit the hwinfo64 sensor settings for the gadgets, clicking on the "List HWinfo indexes" or the "Edit HWinfo settings" links in the settings does nothing. It doesn't open the page to assign the values. On that machine I am running the latest version of hwinfo64, and have turned on the "Enable reporting to gadget" option in the sensors settings.

Any suggestions to get this working? It's an older machine running an Intel Core 2 quad Q6700 with 8GB of ram and an AMD Radeon R5 240 1GB video card, running Win 11 pro x64. The gadgets are running fine there, I just can't configure the GPU and CPU settings to show the correct sensors from HWINFO64

Do you want me to open another issue, or deal with it here?

Let's move this to a new issue, but first, one simple thing you can check. Open Rainmeter > Manage > Settings and double-check that the Editor that is listed there actually exists. Both the items you mention above are simply trying to open your text editor so you can edit/view the file. It sounds like that command is failing.

[SilverAzide]

Thanks for suggesting the way to find the culprit. The one causing the issue is the drivemeter. All the others run and refresh properly, but when I start the drivemeter, all the gadgets and rainmeter lock up. I haven't added a drive in months, so I don't know what change caused the issue.

I am running an NVMe SSD as my system drive, and a couple of raid 5 arrays of SAS drives connected to an HP p812 raid controller in a PCI-E slot. The gadget was working fine with these less than a month ago.

OK, this is strange. One thing that has caused issues for me in the past is if I map a network drive to a drive letter, then for some reason that network drive no longer exists (i.e., the drive is mapped to a dead share or the server is offline). Rainmeter will keep trying that drive once a second to check its status. There will be a long delay as Windows tries and retries accessing that drive, and finally gives up. That duration is more than a second, so effectively during that time Rainmeter is hung. The Gadget checks ALL drives (even network drives) except ones you have unchecked so they are ignored.

To fix this, verify that you don't have any network drives marked "Disconnected" in Windows, or make sure you have unchecked it to ignore it. One thing you can do to debug is open the file C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\Gadgets\@Resources\DrivesVariables.inc and set all the "HideDiskN" variables to "1" except for disk C. Then load the skin and see if it crashes. If all is OK, open the Settings and check one drive at a time until there is a problem. That will be the problematic disk.

[phreich9]

I tried what you suggested, changing all the HideDiskx variables but C to 1, and it still hung when I attempted to activate the Drives gadget. I tried disabling them all, including C, but it still hung.

One other strangeness I noticed is that sometimes (not always), the CPU and TopCPU meters seem a bit hung for a while when they start up, and then eventually refresh and start working.

I turned on logging in Rainmeter, and then restarted rainmeter, and ran all my normal gadgets except the drives gadget, then I started the drives gadget, and it hung. I have attached the log file, but it doesn't seem to show anything abnormal, except that the last thing logged was the refresh of the drives gadget.
Rainmeter.log

One thing that possibly might be have occurred around the time the gadgets stopped working is that I set my documents folder to backup to a onedrive account I have for some volunteer work I do. I didn't realize it was actually going to change the documents folder location to the onedrive name, which is a bit lengthy. Could the file name length be a cause of the issue? You can see the full path in the SKINPATH variable shown in the log.

I also attached a screen scrape showing the working gadgets on my desktop. Note, I just added the TopGPU temporarily after I turned on hardware acceleration in the rainmeter main settings, and wanted to see how much was offloaded to the GPU, and it looks like it's a good thing to do....

[SilverAzide]

The brief delay you see on some gadgets, particularly the CPU and GPU Meters, is normal. They are not hung actually, it's Rainmeter's UsageMonitor plugin preparing to fetch a ton of data from the Windows Performance Counters database. There is a background thread running that is initializing the data, and so for a second or so, no data is coming in.

So you disabled ALL the drives and it still hung up? 😮 That's super strange. So when you did that, there are only 4 measures left running. Try the following. Open the Drives Meter.ini file. Do a search for "[MeasureDiskIdleTimeAll]". Comment out the entire measure AND the next three, i.e., down to and including "[MeasureDiskWriteAll]". Save and then load the skin and see what happens. There will be errors due to the missing measures, but at least we'll see if the problem continues.

Finally, you mentioned OneDrive. This is just me personally, but I despise OneDrive for the very reason you noted, that it takes over your Documents folder. As a result, I either turn OneDrive off completely, or if I can't (like on my work machines), I move the Rainmeter skins folder to someplace else. If you want to move the default skins folder, go to Rainmeter > Manage > Settings and click the "Edit Settings" button. At the top of the file you'll see a [Rainmeter] section with a setting named SkinPath. Just change this to some other location and restart Rainmeter (move or copy your skin folder before restarting).

[SilverAzide]

Please let me know if you are still having this issue.

[SilverAzide]

No response. Closing issue.