Why Would Reinstalling 7.0.22 RC6 Fix Problems?

[Diego Garcia]

I've been wrestling with a series of system lockups, where I have to cycle the system power in order to get it functioning again. During the lockup the mouse pointer is unresponsive, keyboard input is ignored, the display is frozen and the system hard disk is being continually accessed, based on the fact that the drive LED is glowing steady. The lockups appear to be associated with accessing Sage from an HD200.

I tried a lot of different things to fix the problem, including downrevving to 7.0.21 (which I don't recall having the same problems when I was using it). I also did a disk check on all the disks (I get nervous when I have to hard crash the power on a system ).

The only thing that seemed to work -- meaning the system hasn't locked up yet, and I can access Sage from an HD200 -- was to uninstall Sage and then reinstall it.

I've seen recommendations on this forum in the past about that sometimes being a good thing to do. But I'm curious as to why it should be helpful, and would appreciate any technical perspective that folks would like to share on the subject.

p.s. I do wonder if maybe this isn't a "wrong version of Java" issue. A long time ago I remember that being an issue with a particular version of Sage. And Java, in my experience, is very difficult to keep "frozen" at a particular rev level. Does uninstalling and reinstalling Sage force Java to a particular rev level? Unfortunately I neglected to note which version of Java was running before I uninstalled Sage, so I can't tell based on my experience today.

[SteveD]

Instead of reloading the application, Rename the sage properties file with the application stopped. You also need to get rid of the backup properties file. Restart the application and let sage regenerate it from scratch. You will have to set tuners, channel guides back up.. But this is a quick way to isolate issues. You will still have your original properties file that can be put back in place if the new properties file doesn't resolve the issue. If the system runs smoothly after this, add your customizations back and get rid of that old properties file.