When testing Excel on Windows, sometimes TestComplete hangs before even launching Excel

[al666940]

 Hey everyone!

I use TC and TE to test a proprietary plugin in Excel (WIN7 and WIN10, Office 2010, 2013, 2016)

I see that SOMETIMES (say 10% of the time), on WIN10, TC when launched just hangs before even getting to launch Excel (which is the very first thing it does in our test project).

Now, Task Manager,  when this happens, doesn't show anything hoarding either memory or the CPU (no Antimalaware Service Executable suddenly hoarding  CPU, we already took care of that), so at a glance it doesn't seem like a process somehow got in TC's way, resources wise.

And since it becomes non responsive, I can't debug (like check in which line of code it got stuck and take it from there).

Only way to recover is to kill TC in Task Manager, after which, upon relaunching and running again it works just fine.

Any of the top of your head suggestions? All the similar topics I've found here seem relevant to TC hanging AFTER the tested app has already been launched, not prior (anything prior seems to involve exceptions and crashes instead).

[tristaanogre · Accepted solution]

Since it's Windows 10, I'd suggest going to Tools | Options | Engines | General and turning off the option "Enable support for testing Windows Store applications".  It's an educated guess but that particular option enables access to Store based applications which may be suspended in the background, potentially causing this problem.  Disable that option, restart TestComplete and try again.

[Marsha_R]

Could it be that Excel is still open from the last test run?  Excel and TC are both memory hogs so perhaps they are colliding.

I would recommend consulting Support directly about this one.  They know how to get log files out of TC that aren't user readable but that might contain further clues.

https://support.smartbear.com/message/?prod=TestComplete

[al666940]

Hey Marsha,

Nope, it's at the evry first run (the machines TC runs on is a fresly deployed VM, so there's literally no way a previous run is getting in the way)

[al666940]

Hey there,

Thanks for quick reply.

Oh, you mean in TestComplete!

My bad, one moment, I'll try that.

[al666940]

Thanks for the reply!

I already replied but it got deleted stating it was reported as spam, no idea why (I did edit it because I got soemthing wrong the first time, guess I better not edit replies then).

In any case, I can't verify this until the next test run, which is tonight (as I say, it happens intermittently).

So I will mark this as correct once I see a couple night's runs without this issue happening again (in case anyone wonders why I'm taking time to mark any solution as correct).

That OK?

[tristaanogre]

no problem.  AGain, it's an educated guess but worth a try.

Let us know!

[al666940]

Well I just confirmed that we saw the Store open on the taskbar on last night's run where TC froze and didn't open Excel, so it does point to this being the correct one.

I' just want to wait before marking it as correct in case it's not (not sure how easy it is to reopen a question already marked as solved), only reason why I'm waiting.

And thanks again for the REALLY quick reply (wish customer support in general were this good)!