"Cleaning up temporary files"

Hello All,

This post is ancient, but the problem persists to this day with Articulate Studio PResenter 360, as of version 8.26.x. I am happy to report I was able to solve this issue in my particular case.

I have a 140 slide presentation including 10 Quizmaker integrated exams, audio narration, and animated bullets throughout. Recently, one of my stand-by courses that I've successfully published for years suddenly stopped publishing due to freezing at "Cleaning up temporary files."

After doing all of the normal recommended reset and reinstall steps for "unexpected and erratic behavior...", and after rebuilding the presentation by re-using slides and re-importing audio, I methodically started tearing the presentation apart to see what caused the conflict. I stripped out all of the animated bullets. Still crashes. I stripped out all of the practice exams. Still crashes. I stripped out all of the audio. Still crashes. I then rebuilt a presentation by copy-pasting content from source slides to new destination slides in a mirror PPTX file. Still crashes.  I then copied the presentation to 10-slide chunks new presentations, and re-published each to find the problematic slide.

I found it! It was a slide with multiple graphic picture elements and graphic PowerPoint shapes. no animation. Just a simple slide with audio narration. I selected all of the objects, and grouped them per PowerPoint. I then saved the object as a picture, built a new slide using the picture instead of the multiple objects. I deleted the slide with multiple graphics and PPTX shapes. IT PUBLISHED!

That's 3 days of my life I will never get back.

Of course, none of this addresses the issues that remain after years of asking - that the player's search function won't work in HTML, or that audio updates, player updates, and publishing configuration updates do not save to the PPT. Old well-documented problems I've learned to work around by building new presentations.