System configuration:
* Toshiba Tecra 8200, 1 GHz Pentium III CPU, 512 MB RAM
* Windows 2000 Professional SP3, all critical updates installed
* DirectX 8.1 installed
* Running POV-Ray for Windows v3.5

Problem:
Yesterday my laptop started rebooting itself as soon as I open POV-Ray 3.5.
I'll get as far as the splash screen and then suddenly I see a black screen
as the laptop restarts itself.

The only thing that changed on my laptop yesterday was that I installed the
latest beta version of JASC Paint Shop Pro 8 (neat program btw... if it's
not the cause of my problem I'm gonna buy the release version). I have
already tried uninstalling POV-Ray 3.5 and PSP 8, followed by a
reapplication of  Win2K SP3, followed by a reinstallation of DirectX 8.1 and
a reinstall of POV-Ray 3.5 (w/o PSP 8). And it STILL causes my laptop to
reboot itself. What's really strange is that I haven't been able to
replicate the problem with other graphically-intensive programs (e.g.,
ThumbsPlus, PSP, etc.)... only POV-Ray.

The problem seems to be display-related, because if I run the VGA driver in
Safe Mode, POV-Ray starts up just fine. It will also (but not always) start
up if I run my laptop at a really low resolution and color depth (i.e.,
800x600 16 color).

Here's my question: I'm sure it's not a bug in POV-Ray but a hardware
problem on my machine, but it would be helpful if someone on the programming
team could tell me if POV-Ray tries to do anything with the display
subsystem during startup that could cause a flaky video card to freak out
(e.g., does POV-Ray call any DirectX functions that momentarily exercise the
video card?). Any help greatly appreciated... thanks.

Scott Gammans
http://www.scottgammans.com

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In article <3e67c0b9$1@news.povray.org> , "Scott Gammans" 
<nos### [at] scottgammansspamisevilcom> wrote:

> e.g., does POV-Ray call any DirectX functions that momentarily exercise the
> video card?

No.  POV-Ray is a ray-tracer.  DirectX is no use for it.

The problem is probably not POV-Ray but either some driver or another
application that uses that driver and which you installed recently.

    Thorsten

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Right... that's what I said: I'm sure it's not a bug in POV-Ray. But since I
can only get this problem to occur with POV-Ray, I'm trying to figure out
what POV-Ray is doing at startup that no other application on my workstation
is doing (because no other program on my workstation causes it to
spontaneously reboot).

"Thorsten Froehlich" <tho### [at] trfde> wrote in message
news:3e67c401$1@news.povray.org...
> In article <3e67c0b9$1@news.povray.org> , "Scott Gammans"
> <nos### [at] scottgammansspamisevilcom> wrote:
>
> > e.g., does POV-Ray call any DirectX functions that momentarily exercise
the
> > video card?
>
> No.  POV-Ray is a ray-tracer.  DirectX is no use for it.
>
> The problem is probably not POV-Ray but either some driver or another
> application that uses that driver and which you installed recently.
>
>     Thorsten

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Try lower the the graphics hardware acceleration slider and see if that
helps


--
Rick

Kitty5 NewMedia http://Kitty5.co.uk
POV-Ray News & Resources http://Povray.co.uk
TEL : +44 (01270) 501101 - FAX : +44 (01270) 251105 - ICQ : 15776037

PGP Public Key
http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x231E1CEA

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Scott Gammans's furious key-hammering produced this:
> Yesterday my laptop started rebooting itself as soon as I open POV-Ray 3.5.
> I'll get as far as the splash screen and then suddenly I see a black screen
> as the laptop restarts itself.

Weird.  Does the screen look like it might be flashing blue for a fraction of
a second?  It sounds like a driver problem (resulting in a blue screen) of death
to me.

Try this: right-click "My Computer" and select "Properties".  Click on the
"Advanced" tab of the dialog box that comes up and click on the "Settings"
button near "Startup and Recovery".  Under the "System Failure" frame, ensure
that "automatically restart" is turned off.  If it was on, click "ok" on both
dialogs and try starting POV-Ray.  If you get a blue screen with debugging
information, write down the error codes and any other information that could
pin-point what driver is failing (probably a driver with a .drv or .sys
extension such as "nv4disp.drv").  Most of the numbers are meaningless to many
of the people here so you shouldn't have to include them.

On the other hand, if the option was off in the first place, leave it off,
cancel out of both dialogs, but don't start POV-Ray.

-- 
/*^*/light_source{100*<-5,2,-5>2}#macro I(i,n)#while(strlen(i)>=n)#local A=asc(
substr(i,n,1));#local a=asc(substr(i,n+1,1));cylinder{<div(A,8)-12,mod(A,8)-4,4
><div(a,8)-12,mod(a,8)-4,4>,0.1pigment{rgb z}}#local n=n+2;#end#end I("ScUe[]"1
/*<*/)I("mkmtlttk"1)//@_$#!,:<"Thhis polysig brought to you by Ian Burgmyer :)"

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Ian:

OK, this is really weird. I went to the Windows 2000 event log and saw a
bunch of errors that read something like "Windows 2000 has rebooted because
of a bugcheck." I also noticed that the system log was VERY large, and I
seem to recall that Windows get flaky when the event log gets to be of
considerable size. Unfortunately, I was a bit hasty with my mouseclicks and
I didn't save the event log before emptying it. And now I can't seem to get
POV-Ray to crash Windows... whether I have "Automatically reboot" checked or
not.

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Rick:

For some reason I wasn't able to get that tab to come up on the display
properties dialog box until I cleared out the Windows event log (see my
reply below to Ian Burgmyer). Whenever I clicked on that tab, the Display
Properties dialog box would hang and I'd have to close it through Task
Manager.

Now that I've emptied the event log, though, not only can I access that tab,
but it doesn't seem to have any effect--I can't get POV-Ray to crash Windows
no matter what I try to do with hardware acceleration. Very strange.

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Scott Gammans's furious key-hammering produced this:
> OK, this is really weird. I went to the Windows 2000 event log and saw a
> bunch of errors that read something like "Windows 2000 has rebooted because
> of a bugcheck."

Bugcheck?  Heh, I don't think I've ever seen that before.

> I also noticed that the system log was VERY large, and I
> seem to recall that Windows get flaky when the event log gets to be of
> considerable size.

The event log should have a size limit imposed on it (it does on XP, at least).
Try right-clicking on the particular log and clicking "properties".  Mine are
all set to 512KB (the default for XP) and I haven't had any problems with it.

> And now I can't seem to get
> POV-Ray to crash Windows... whether I have "Automatically reboot" checked or
> not.

How is that a bad thing? ;)

-- 
/*^*/light_source{100*<-5,2,-5>2}#macro I(i,n)#while(strlen(i)>=n)#local A=asc(
substr(i,n,1));#local a=asc(substr(i,n+1,1));cylinder{<div(A,8)-12,mod(A,8)-4,4
><div(a,8)-12,mod(a,8)-4,4>,0.1pigment{rgb z}}#local n=n+2;#end#end I("ScUe[]"1
/*<*/)I("mkmtlttk"1)//@_$#!,:<"Thhis polysig brought to you by Ian Burgmyer :)"

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"Ian J. Burgmyer" <the### [at] maccom> wrote in message
news:3e6af34c@news.povray.org...

> > And now I can't seem to get
> > POV-Ray to crash Windows... whether I have "Automatically reboot"
checked or
> > not.
>
> How is that a bad thing? ;)
Eh... only a bad thing in that I now hold my breath every time I start
POV-Ray, not knowing whether or not Windows might decide to BSD all over me.
:p

But thanks anyway!

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"Scott Gammans" <nos### [at] scottgammansspamisevilcom> wrote in
news:3e6cd534$1@news.povray.org: 

> 
> "Ian J. Burgmyer" <the### [at] maccom> wrote in message
> news:3e6af34c@news.povray.org...
> 
>> > And now I can't seem to get
>> > POV-Ray to crash Windows... whether I have "Automatically reboot"
> checked or
>> > not.
>>
>> How is that a bad thing? ;)
> Eh... only a bad thing in that I now hold my breath every time I start
> POV-Ray, not knowing whether or not Windows might decide to BSD all
> over me. 
>:p
> 
> But thanks anyway!
> 
> 
> 

Is your event log set to overwrite events older than seven days?

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