Eagle 7.6.0 constantly crashing - what to do?

Question

Hi everyone. I'm at a loss as to how to handle this situation. I'd been using Eagle freeware for about a month flawlessly, but over the last two weeks or so I can barely do more than 5 minutes of work without it crashing and burning (well, not exactly burning.) Simple things like zooming in and out of a schematic, scrolling in a schematic, or even clicking on a button on a toolbar will cause it to crash. So far I've spent most of my time in the schematic editor, so I'm not 100% sure if it also happens in the PCB editor. I'm running it on a Mac (10.10), and I was also seeing the same problem with 7.5.0. Rather conveniently 7.6.0 came out not long after I started seeing the crashes with 7.5.0, so I upgraded hoping that might help, but alas, 7.6.0 had the exact same problem. I tried restarting, I completely deleted the Eagle application folder and re-installed, but neither of those did anything to help. Can anyone suggest anything else? The first tell-tale signs its about to happen are when I start to see graphical glitches, like that in the attached screenshot. Then, a couple of clicks later, boom - crash. I'm at the stage where I'm constantly saving my work in fear of losing it. I'm really really liking Eagle, and Ive been considering purcashing a license, but if its going to behave like this, I dunno ....... Many thanks. Tom 
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mrmarple · Answer

Eagle 7.6.0 running on a Hac (yes Hac) with OSX 10.10.5 Yosemite and two monitors is stable here, no unexpected crashes. I can crash it, I avoid the one situation that I know is a problem. Starting eagle from the desktop by double clicking on a board icon, it might be a downloaded board, or a board not in a project. The board opens but a mouse wheel zoom kills Eagle, resize the window before zooming and all is fine. If do anything unusual in Eagle I quit and restart. I turned file locking off early on, what is the intent of this feature? -- Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca. Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

vintagesynthlab · Answer

Update: The latest Cadsoft release 7.7.0 has not resolved this issue.

autodeskguest · Answer

On 11.07.2016 13:50, Richard Hammerl wrote: try to switch off the file locking in the EAGLE Control Panel, in the menu Options, Backup/Locking. Does it help? Probably out of topic, but take it from a very experienced user; I do hope you recognize that the file locking IS STILL FAILING in 7.6.0 (win10). I didn't turn it off cause I wanted to check it out. Now and then I get a false lock error message. This can happen after some time afk, when trying to save, or at start of the day, loading my project (I assumed it wasnt deleted at close). I have tried to quickly dig into details whats happening, but found no conclusion. I suggest its eiter put this feature under severe stresstest or just remove it.

rachaelp · Answer

Hi Tom,

Are you still on Yosemite 10.10 or have you upgraded to El Capitan or Sierra now? EAGLE is rock solid for me on both my Macs and has been for a long time. I do recall crashes early on but that was on v7.1 and on Yosemite. From your early screenshots it does look like a graphics driver issue to me, and the graphics drivers will be updated by major system version updates so if you haven't updated then moving to a newer version of MacOS may help. I appreciate you say you'd expect graphics driver issues to cause more grief than just crashing one app but in my experience that isn't always the case if that one app is doing things that tax the graphics system in a particular way that nothing else does.

Best Regards,

Rachael