Weather skin with webparser no longer works

[anbr07]

Update: uninstalling Rainmeter / new install doesn't help, it looks the same, crashes immediately. Nothing interesting to find in the program folder, nothing in %appdata%.

How can a single mistake crash the whole application, without any chances to reset it to some earlier state? I have a backup of my system, which would leave me for over one hour to restore my older system. I'm getting very frustrated with the issues of this program. Seriously.

[jsmorley]

Update: uninstalling Rainmeter / new install doesn't help, it looks the same, crashes immediately. Nothing interesting to find in the program folder, nothing in %appdata%.

How can a single mistake crash the whole application, without any chances to reset it to some earlier state? I have a backup of my system, which would leave me for over one hour to restore my older system. I'm getting very frustrated with the issues of this program. Seriously.

What you want to do is open Windows Explorer, (file manager) and paste this in the address field:

%APPDATA%\Rainmeter and hit enter.

Delete the Rainmeter.ini file there.

Now start Rainmeter from the Start menu, and it will be reset to the default. A clean, new Rainmeter.ini will be created. The default illustro skins will be loaded.

I would not recommend loading whatever skin it is that is crashing Rainmeter for you. Or if you do, to try and get it working right, you might want to keep that path above handy...

While possible, it's highly unusual for a skin to just insta-crash Rainmeter. I would be suspicious of some 3rd-party plugin that one of your skins is using. It's possible to create an error that pretty much crashes Rainmeter, mostly by creating an endless loop like:

IfCondition=1 = 1
IfTrueAction=[!Refresh]

That is pretty certain to crash Rainmeter pretty quickly as it tries to refresh the skin over and over forever, as FAST AS IT CAN, which is really, really fast. It will rapidly just eat its own face.

Not too many other ways to insta-crash Rainmeter just using native Rainmeter code, which is why I always suspect some 3rd-party plugin is misbehaving.

[SilverAzide]

That was the skin that broke in the first place. I tried it anyway. The result, all of Rainmeter is broken now. It starts for about 2 seconds, then crashes. I can't even get into the menu to try to fix anything.

Are you saying the Gadgets suite is causing the crash? I was not clear if that is what you meant. If so, don't get PO'ed at Rainmeter, you should be PO'ed at me, LOL. Do the file deletion trick JSMorley described and then load one Gadget at a time until you get the crash. I'd like to know more about the problem so I can fix it. Make sure you are using the latest version as well.

There are some Gadgets that try to auto-configure themselves for your machine and then restart, exactly as JSMorley describes above, but for some reason the configuration fails and you get stuck in a loop. I've seen it happen FOR SURE on really old PCs that run slow, where a command that normally takes a blink of an eye takes 5-10 seconds to complete, in which case the skin has long since given up and refreshed, causing a loop.

[jsmorley]

Are you saying the Gadgets suite is causing the crash? I was not clear if that is what you meant. If so, don't get PO'ed at Rainmeter, you should be PO'ed at me, LOL. Do the file deletion trick JSMorley described and then load one Gadget at a time until you get the crash. I'd like to know more about the problem so I can fix it. Make sure you are using the latest version as well.

There are some Gadgets that try to auto-configure themselves for your machine and then restart, exactly as JSMorley describes above, but for some reason the configuration fails and you get stuck in a loop. I've seen it happen FOR SURE on really old PCs that run slow, where a command that normally takes a blink of an eye takes 5-10 seconds to complete, in which case the skin has long since given up and refreshed, causing a loop.

Shame on you...

[jsmorley]

I don't know anything about how you are doing things SilverAzide, but my rule of thumb is that ANYTHING that refreshes Rainmeter or refreshes the skin must be driven by a positive user-action, clicking a button of some kind. Some way that they can say "well, I don't want to do that again...". A user can pretty much never create a loop with clicks, no matter how fast they hammer a button. Human muscles work in an entirely different concept of time than a computer program does.

[anbr07]

Thanks guys. I had figured out another way to get Rainmeter back up. I finally found the right location, which was mentioned in the .ini. then deleted the whole weather folder, so i can enjoy all the other modules. I am not sure, if Gadgets actually causes it, or the double install did, but that was the last thing i had changed before the application went into that crash loop. So i guess i'll better wait, until (hopefully) Weather.com has cleaned up their mess, caused by those changes in their format, or whatever caused the weather module to stop working. And yes, i was considering deleting the .ini file, but i also was worrying about losing my special CPU meters configuration, which i had through the help of this forum. But going through the old posts and instructions again to reconfigure it would have be a major issue for me, since i have no clues about all the details with skins, themes, meter and that kind of stuff. So, finally the day is saved. I also have some backup of those folders, so i could try to swap back the meters folder to see, if the issue persists. Anyway, i'm glad to not see the left side of my monitor all naked, with 80% of my other stuff working again. I i find out something about the causes, i'll report back here.

[SilverAzide]

I don't know anything about how you are doing things SilverAzide, ....

Worked-Fine-In-Dev-Ops-Problem-Now.jpg

[jsmorley]

Thanks guys. I had figured out another way to get Rainmeter back up. I finally found the right location, which was mentioned in the .ini. then deleted the whole weather folder, so i can enjoy all the other modules. I am not sure, if Gadgets actually causes it, or the double install did, but that was the last thing i had changed before the application went into that crash loop. So i guess i'll better wait, until (hopefully) Weather.com has cleaned up their mess, caused by those changes in their format, or whatever caused the weather module to stop working. And yes, i was considering deleting the .ini file, but i also was worrying about losing my special CPU meters configuration, which i had through the help of this forum. But going through the old posts and instructions again to reconfigure it would have be a major issue for me, since i have no clues about all the details with skins, themes, meter and thast stuff. So, finally the day is saved. I also have some backup of those folders, so i could try to swap back the meters folder to see, if the issue persists. Anyway, i'm glad to not see the left side of my monitor all naked, with 80% of my other stuff working again. I i find out something about the causes, i'll report back here.

Glad to hear it. Just FYI, deleting Rainmeter.ini won't cause you to lose anything at all, except settings for the skins like where on the screen they are, and if they can be dragged and stuff like that. Deleting the .ini won't lose any skins, nor any settings you might have set in variables and such in the skins.

[SilverAzide]

I don't know anything about how you are doing things SilverAzide, but my rule of thumb is that ANYTHING that refreshes Rainmeter or refreshes the skin must be driven by a positive user-action, clicking a button of some kind. Some way that they can say "well, I don't want to do that again...". A user can pretty much never create a loop with clicks, no matter how fast they hammer a button. Human muscles work in an entirely different concept of time than a computer program does.

Well, it's sloppy coding in a few cases, or newbie coding to be more charitable. Some of the Gadgets I put together an awful long time ago and I haven't cleaned up the code since then. Mostly it's trying to make skins "auto-configure" themselves (like the size of a skin dependent on number of cores or whatever). I do need to clean things up a bit.

[SilverAzide]

Thanks guys. I had figured out another way to get Rainmeter back up. I finally found the right location, which was mentioned in the .ini. then deleted the whole weather folder, so i can enjoy all the other modules. I am not sure, if Gadgets actually causes it, or the double install did, but that was the last thing i had changed before the application went into that crash loop. So i guess i'll better wait, until (hopefully) Weather.com has cleaned up their mess, caused by those changes in their format, or whatever caused the weather module to stop working. And yes, i was considering deleting the .ini file, but i also was worrying about losing my special CPU meters configuration, which i had through the help of this forum. But going through the old posts and instructions again to reconfigure it would have be a major issue for me, since i have no clues about all the details with skins, themes, meter and that kind of stuff. So, finally the day is saved. I also have some backup of those folders, so i could try to swap back the meters folder to see, if the issue persists. Anyway, i'm glad to not see the left side of my monitor all naked, with 80% of my other stuff working again. I i find out something about the causes, i'll report back here.

So it's the Weather Meter skin that is causing the issue? The weather.com problems should be OK now, so it sounds like a problem with the skin. Let me know if this is the case. If you load a skin and it crashes Rainmeter, you can edit the Rainmeter.ini file (instead of deleting it) to set the "Active=1" value to "Active=0" for the skin that is causing the problem.