Month: September 2012

Most of the embedded systems I design output data in a CSV format for performance analysis, monitoring and debugging. So I add LibreOffice Calc to the CSV files “Open with” Explorer option for convenience. When moving from OpenOffice, or upgrading LibreOffice versions, the file association is sometimes broken do to left over registry keys pointing to the wrong place for scalc.exe.

In the past I would manually delete the left over entries using RegEdit, a rather slow and boring task. This post on the OO forum points out the easiest method of fixing this issue, using CCleaner. I like to use the portable version because I rarely run the program so by the time I want to run it again I need to get the latest version anyway.

I really like LibreOffice so recently I upgraded to the 3.6 version on my Win7 64 Pro PC. Soon after upgrading I noticed some major slowdowns but since I was working on humongous data analysis spreadsheets I assumed it was my abuse of spreadsheets. The spreadsheets contain thousands of data points that are charted and have basic statistics calculated. Normally I’d take the time to do analysis and graphing in R but, since I don’t anticipate needing to re-run these analyses I got lazy and just used Calc.

Last night I noticed that when I opened one of the spreadsheets in Calc, Windows Explorer started continuously accessing my NAS file server. Even after closing Calc the network access continued and then Explorer crashed when I tried to use any explorer function (e.g. empty the recycle bin). After a re-boot Explorer was still doing the excessive network access but after a few minutes it stopped. So I tried just opening Calc without opening a spreadsheet from the file server. The problem started right up indicating that this was not a problem with massive spreadsheets as I had guessed.

This morning I decided to investigate more and discovered these two somewhat related problems in the LibreOffice bug list (weird, the bug list server went down as I was testing the links). It turns out there is a bug in the LibreOffice Explorer shell extensions DLL, some users recommended using the command line tool to un-register the DLL but, one user said he solved his problem by re-installing LibreOffice and disabling the shell extensions option. This made me think that the easiest way would be to use the change feature of the Windows Installer. I tried it out and it worked perfectly fixing the problem. Here are step by step screen shots of this easy way to fix this problem.

The rest of the steps should be obvious.