I'm experiencing a performance problem with Document Explorer. From what I can tell, it involves online help -- in other words, if I limit it to use just local help (full MSDN installed on a local drive), it functions more or less normally. If I let it also use online help, searching simply locks up Document Explorer.
I use the words "more or less normally" because even using local help, it takes almost two minutes to start up, and also takes almost two minutes to access the Tools/Options dialog (i.e. I click on Tools/Options, it takes almost two full minutes to respond).
I've watched the TCP activity during those moments (using sysinternals' TDIMon), and it looks like there's a definite correlation between Document Explorer accessing http://services2.msdn.microsoft.com and the occurrence of the problem. Note that the access to services2.msdn.microsoft.com succeeds.
Short of trying to reinstall MSDN, I'm at a loss to figure out what to try next.
Any help will be much appreciated.
Josh Korn
p.s. version = Document Explorer 8.0.50727.42 RTM
Document Explorer extremely slow to start, can't access online help
MWeinblatt
Correction: I'm able to send messages to services2.msdn.microsoft.com. However, receives always time out and fail.
Josh
crsqn91l
Saurabh:
>> Are you behind some proxy
Don't think so.
>> Also, can you bring up Help->Search and execute search (with
>> online help and MSDN online provider enabled)
No. The Document Explorer simply hangs if SearchProviders.xml is missing.
I doubt that the problem is directly related to network or proxy settings, since I'm generally able to access online help when SearchProviders.xml is present (except during certain peak hours, where our Internet connection suffers from poor performance everywhere).
One scenario that seems to explain what's happening is that upon detecting that SearchProviders.xml is missing, the Document Explorer attempts to download it from services2.msdn.microsoft.com, and fails.
For reasons I don't understand, I never was able to manually download this file (using the Codezone button). I'm still not able to ping services2.msdn.microsoft.com.
Josh
T-BERK
Found it.
It turns out that the CodeZone provider list (SearchProviders.xml) was missing. Immediately after install, the Tools/Options/Help/Online dialog has a button labelled "Download Provider List", which is replaced by the actual list of providers once you successfully download the list.
But for some reason, when I attempt to download the Provider List, it fails on a timeout.
However, getting hold of the provider list via sneakernet seems to do the trick.
Sarayuth
Josh,
Are you behind some proxy
Also, can you bring up Help->Search and execute search (with online help and MSDN online provider enabled). If search fails, can you tell what Search results display as the error message
--
Regards,
Saurabh