Yea! I have my Windows Live Writer back! I downloaded BlogDesk but haven’t really messed around with it yet.
The truth is that I can’t spend too much time on my own blogs and get all of my writing work done at the same time, so learning a new blogging program wasn’t top on my list.
For those of you who are not familiar with Windows Live Writer, it is an offline blogging utility from Microsoft. Unlike many Microsoft products which seem to earn the automatic ire of the blogging community, this one has gone over pretty well, probably because it is a pretty good program.
One of the huge things it does for me, is that I can Copy and image off of a website or from a Word document, or wherever and then Paste that image directly into the post I’m writing without having to first save it to disk and then upload or attach the file to my post. Just by pasting it into the post, Live Writer handles getting it up on my WordPress site as part of publishing the article.
Sure, there is a lot of junk code that it puts in (go figure) and some things don’t work exactly the way I would like, but nothing else works as well yet, nor as fast, and since time is money, I’m going with Live Writer for the time being.
Live Writer Crashes Caused By Auto-Link Feature
I had been using Windows Live Writer for several months now, since it was beta, with no real problems. Then, it suddenly started crashing on me every time I clicked on the LINK button. Also, Live Writer crashed whenever I clicked on Options inside the Tools menu.
After a search I found a thread at Microsoft from someone who seemed to be having the same issue and was eventually directed to this guy where it turns out that if you have an empty auto-link entry somehow then Writer throws an exception and crashes.
And, by the way, big kudos to Microsoft for monitoring the thread and posting a solution. Even letting us know that a bug report has already been logged and that they hope to fix it in the next version. Thanks!
That wasn’t my problem exactly, but it gave me a place to start and upon further examination I found out that if you have a duplicate auto-link entry, Windows Live Writer will throw an exception. I had apparently already setup an auto-link for my Dad View of Parenting Tips and Advice website when I accidentally setup another one.
Auto-link entries are stored in an XML file in c:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Windows Live Writer\LinkGlossary
If you have an empty entry, you will have <text> </text> tags with nothing in between them. Either delete that whole entry (not just that line) or put something in between the tags. To find a duplicate, just go through the file and look, or carefully read Windows Live Writer error message which will tell you which entry is a duplicate. Then, just find and delete one.
So, either don’t use the Auto-Link feature, or try and remember what you have already set to auto-link. If you ever accidentally hit the auto-link button, don’t just cancel out. Fill in some junk text and then go back and delete it so that you don’t accidentally create an empty field.
*
*
1 thought on “Windows Live Writer Crashes Fix Solution”