1.8.2 endlessly reinstalls virtual MIDI ports

Today, a very bad day... booted laptop and 1.82 comes up ready to "install" the VM ports, as if the program has just been installed.  I let it install them, but then it couldn't open its own BM short-name ports, only saw 3 of the 9 ports that should have been there.  I went to settings and set it for 9 VM short-name ports.  Then I rebooted.  It came up again, ready to "install" the VM ports.  I uninstalled it, reinstalled it.  Same thing again, it just wanted to endlessly install itself, can couldn't find its own VM ports. (I have a saved project, and it couldn't completely open it, giving messages about the missing VM ports).

So I finally uninstalled it and went back to 1.81 which seems to be running fine.

What did I change from yesterday to today?  The only thing that is changed is in "settings" I set it to minimize on start.  That's it, it is the only change (I have Windows update turned off).  But that was enough to send the program into a tailspin.

Running Windows 7, updates were run with WSUS about a month ago.

Thanks for your help.  Really, when 1.81 would sometimes lose my settings file, that was no big deal, I just loaded it manually.  But with 1.81 the program was always running correctly, even if it lost the settings that I'd run the day before.  This problem with 1.82 is a no-go, it completely stopped everything and even after a half-hour of installing / reinstalled / rebooting / reinstalling / uninstalling / rebooting etc it never did work correctly anymore.

Hi Bob, have you tried turning off Start Minimized in 1.8.2?
I’ve also changed the title, because this seems to be exclusively an issue with the virtual ports.

And, sorry to say, I have no idea what could be wrong. We don\’t have any other reports like this.
If you find out anything, please let us know. We’ll look into this, too.

Might be the same issue as this one:
https://www.bomeloft.com/support/kb/midi-translator-automatically-reinstalls-on-startup
But that user has reported back that 1.8.2 fixed all his problems.

Last thing: 1.8.2 maintains a log file for debugging stuff like this: BomeMTProLog.txt in the temp folder.
This log file can give us a clue what was happening.
Please open a Windows Explorer, then in the address bar, type %TEMP% and hit ENTER. In the resulting temp folder, look for BomeMTProLog.txt and either send it to me directly, or attach it here in the Q&A. Thanks!

Thanks for the log file. It clearly shows that on your computer, somehow the settings file got cleared/truncated (i.e. the size dropped to zero) in between two MT Pro sessions. Notable is that the MT Pro session before the truncation was not correctly terminated: from the log file I could see that MT Pro did not save the settings file in that case.

So it is very possible that the problem you were seeing with 1.8.2 is due to the same “lost settings” problem that you experienced in 1.8.1. The number of (intended) virtual MIDI ports is set in the settings file. Whenever the settings file is reset/cleared/removed,

You reported via email that the computer sometimes crashed or would not shut down correctly due to other programs, but you don’t think the MT Pro settings problem was related time wise.

MT Pro 1.8.2 has a new settings recovery, but it does not seem to have fixed matters in this case. We’ll look into the code of MT Pro to improve behavior for a truncated settings file. Most efforts so far have been put into an assumed settings file deletion.

My only guess on how this happens is this: in the precise moment where MT Pro writes the settings file, the computer hangs or crashes or is forcibly turned off. In that case, MT Pro managed to truncate the file (which is indeed the first operation) but could not follow up with writing the contents.

I can think of 2 ideas how to work around that:
1) write a temporary settings file first, and only when successful, rename it to the settings file
2) use a backup settings file also when the settings file is truncated

I’ll prepare a beta version and send it to you in private to see if that helps.

Florian, sorry I’ve not gotten back to you, I’ve not had time to work with the computer and music for the past two weeks… The Uni began this past week and I had to prepare my courses and communicate with students (I teach English at the Uni in Bielefeld, DE), so I’ve been swamped… I’ll hopefully have some time next week to load the update and get back to my read work 😉 Thanks for keeping on top of this, very very much appreciated. Bob T