Forum Discussion
Storyline360 refuses to open under Parallels
To start this off, I am communicating with the Articulate Tech Support staff, but sadly we have yet to find a solution to my issue. So I am hoping there is a Mac user on here who might have dealt with this issue in the past.
I have a Mac Studio, M1, OS Tahoe. I run the Articulate app using Parallels (v26) (note this issue started under v17, so I upgraded to v26) on Windows 11. My Mac, Parallels, Windows and Articulate/Storyline360 are all up to date.
Only in the last 30 days or so, I'm not 100% sure when it started, but Storyline just stopped booting. Basically when I try to launch SL360 through the Articulate360 app, 2 things happen. The program starts to run, but quickly stops. Nothing pops up, and looking at Task Manager it goes from 14% to 11% then 0% CPU.
The other result that can sometimes happen is when I try to launch SL360 the boot screen does appear and while it's trying to Initialise Components, it freezes and stops responding.
I have tried booting SL360 directly rather than through the Articulate launch app. I have tried Running as an administrator. I have installed from scratch Parallels, Articulate and Storyline. I have tried running an older version of SL360. I have followed every attempted solution the Articulate staff have sent me.
I'm simply hoping there might be a Mac user on here that has a solution to this mystery.
6 Replies
Have you tried starting Windows in Safe Mode?
Have you started Storyline from a command line session, so you can see any messages it might emit?Try this if you haven’t already: find the SL .exe file and right click it and select properties. Go to the compatibility tab. Under the windows on arm section click safe emulation settings. Select use safe emulation mode and click ok. Try to relaunch SL. You might have to clear the cache too. Run command prompt as admin and run these one at a time.. 1. sc stop xtacache
2. del C:\Windows\xtacache /q /s
3. sc start xtacacheThanks DShaw and CarlFink1
Neither suggestions helped. I may have to shift to a PC....
If you can grab some info when the launch/freeze occurs that might help identify what’s going on.
In Windows, open Event Viewer -Windows Logs - Application. Launch SL to trigger the crash, then look for a red application error or .NET runtime entry when the launch dies. It’ll name a faulting module some .dll. That should identify the culprit. Paste it in here. When it’s frozen there might not be a crash entry so open task manager- details tab - right click storyline.exe and create dump file. You could also right click and analyse wait chain. Would be interesting to see what info you get.
I'm having the same problem, and yes, it's been going on for about a month. A few weeks ago I could still open a file that I had opened recently that I had sitting on my desktop. Once I had it open, I could often (but not always) open another file. I could never open it from the Articulate360 app. Same thing--it would start to open and in task manager go from some % down to 0%. Other times it just did nothing at all.
I went away for a week for vacation and when I came back, I couldn't get it to open at all, even from the file on my desktop. Yesterday someone from IT did something--I'm not sure what--and I was able to open it from a file on my Parallels desktop again. It was very unstable. It crashed a couple of times and then was very slow to respond. Then this morning I couldn't get it to open at all, so I'm back to where I was a week ago. I have several projects that I'm now falling behind on and am getting somewhat desperate and wondering if I need to get a PC.If you can grab some info when the launch/freeze occurs that might help identify what’s going on.
In Windows, open Event Viewer -Windows Logs - Application. Launch SL to trigger the crash, then look for a red application error or .NET runtime entry when the launch dies. It’ll name a faulting module some .dll. That should identify the culprit. Paste it in here. When it’s frozen there might not be a crash entry so open task manager- details tab - right click storyline.exe and create dump file. You could also right click and analyse wait chain. Would be interesting to see what info you get
