Openrocket crashes when attempting to open files

This is a rather strange new glitch I noticed very recently. Openrocket opens up normally, and sits there with an empty rocket file (exactly how it's supposed to work). However, if I then click on file->open, it freezes for about half a second and then closes as if I had closed the application. The same thing happens if I try to save as (simply saving modifications to a file works just fine, only attempting to "save as" causes the crash). I am able to open files from the "open recent" dropdown list as well as files from the "open example" dropdown. I think the most important connection is that it is only crashing when it tries to open up a file browser window.

Is anyone else experiencing this? If not, does anyone have any ideas for how to fix the problem? I came up with a kludgy workaround by downloading Neil W's repackaged openrocket.exe and setting it as the default application for .ork files, but while that allows me to open old simulations, I'm still unable to save any new ones.

I suspect that this problem was triggered either by a recent Windows or Java update.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If you haven't given it an addition reboot after patching then you should do so. Even if patching includes a reboot it does not necessarily start up correctly, often it will apply additional updates at boot so boot order can be affected etc. sounds very much like Java is having issue talking to the OS file system.

Tried rebooting again, still no luck. I'm going to try uninstalling Java and Openrocket.exe, then only installing openrocket (the repackaged EXE supposedly doesn't require Java to be installed). Hopefully that'll fix whatever is causing the issue.

during the uninstall, I noticed several error logs. I don't know enough about programming to figure out what's actually going on. One of the files is attached.View attachment hs_err_pid14360.txt

There are several things at play here. I'm guessing that you recently installed, or were forced to install, Windows 10 Creators Update? There were some compatibility issues with that. The attached error log indicates that it cannot find necessary files - some are part of Java itself and some are Open Rocket. I'm not sure what that EXE packager is doing but I suspect it's bundling a version of Java inside of itself. Locking yourself into that version (which is somewhat obsolete) further complicates trying to fix this. And it looks like it might be trying to load different parts of the Java runtime from different parts of your system - some from the packaged version inside of the EXE and some from local installations of Java (which it may be picking up because they are on your PATH).

I would recommend entirely removing the open rocket exe installation, uninstalling any and all Java (JRE and/or JDK) versions, then installing the latest Oracle JRE https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre8-downloads-2133155.html Then install Open Rocket and run it directly.

Your other option is to first just remove all local versions of Java (JRE/JDK) and then retry with just the packaged EXE - it may then no longer get confused and try to load stuff from other places.

Doug