Winros freezes Excel

[lparkh]

Hi,
I would really appreciate some help as I am staring rebuilding my whole machine in the face (not fun). The "winros" interface in excel used to work for me. It stopped working if I call a function using winros (i.e. add it to a cell) I get the hourglass and it never returns. A reinstall of excel worked for awhile but then it stopped working again. I tried the following (all repeatedly):
-- reinstall excel
-- reinstall office fully
-- reinstall esignal
-- clean and compress registry (via a tool)
Interestingly the esignal desktop api continues to work.
I am not very familiar with DDEs is their any advice any one could offer? Do I need to clean out a particular registry entry for example?
Rebuilding my machine will be very painful so please help!
Thanks,
Lin
p.s. if this is wrong forum please redirect me

[eSignal-J.J.]

Hi Lin,

You need to find a little application called Sigtools. Do a search in your system for this. It was installed when you installed esignal.

Sigtools is an easy way to get Excel to extract the data from the data manager. Once you find Sigtool, you should be able to re-establish your connection between Excel and the eSignal Data Manager.

The following link is to our Knowledgebase article on how to set up the DDE linking: http://kb.esignalcentral.com/article...ticle=1421&p=1

Hope this helps.

[lparkh]

winros freeze and sigtools

thanks for your suggestion. I had actually dug this up from your KB and tried with same result (it has a button that does sample sheet) namely freezing. So this doesn't help.
Given in the same KB page you'all say you will support I would be very appreciate of any further suggestions.
Lin
p.s. I don't think it is antivirus issues because never was issue before and the virus scan finishes before the problem occurs AND I have tried turning off antivirus.

[boshek]

I am also having this problem. When I first started using Winros with excel, everything was fine. However after a few days excel started freezing when I choose "Update" immediately after loading the sheet. It makes no difference whether I launch sigtools or not.

There was a period when intermittently it would "unfreeze" and start to work if I waited for 10-20mins but that no longer happens anymore.

I have built a sheet that only has 2 data requests as a test but again it seems the number of data requests makes no difference.

Any help with this matter would be really helpful. Many thanks.

[lparkh]

latest on Winros freezing

I finally had to bite the bullet and rebuild my machine. Based on that experience my best guess is that in my case it was due to Norton Anti-Virus. A bit of a hunch based on a view clues but have been able to get things going again while not using Norton (I never tried reinstaling Norton after rebuild so I could be wrong about this) and using instead Microsoft Onecare (which may be a bit weaker as an anti-virus I've heard). That had some issues to in getting things going (you have to boot the esignal server BEFORE booting the app and also make sure it is allowed by one care). But things are working for now.
The only other intersting clue I was able to spot was that apparently around november for one vendor a lot of their clients (using their tool which uses winros) started reporting similar problems. Perhaps some update was released to Norton which caused the issue. I seem to recall my problems started around then to too.
Best of luck

[boshek]

Thanks for the info. I should have said in my previous post that I don't use Norton (as I use McAfee) so there may be some other things that are affecting it.

Have you ever noticed any difference in behaviour according to the time of day? I can never get it to work during the US trading hours but I have just managed to get it going (without rebuilding/reinstalling excel/fixing registry etc.) in the after hours of the US day session. I have to wait about 4 minutes after I choose "Update" but after that it "unfreezes" itself and starts updating.

I clean boot the machine and allow it to launch the usual things that get launched at startup such as McAfee, firewall, VOIP software even Quicktime etc. Then started just the esignal data manager (winros) and then started my excel sheet with the data requests. After the 4min wait and the datafields start to update, I started lauching all of the other apps I would run during the day such as esignal, firefox, email client, IExplorer, trading platform etc. and it still seems to work fine.

Could it be that it works due to the decreased traffic during the after hours?

I will repeat this experiment tomorrow during the day and see if I can get the same results.

I will let you know tomorrow. Thanks and good luck.

[lparkh]

FUrther thoughts

Hmm your problem is different then mine was. Mine never returned. Yours sounds like a performance issue. Might want to think about your machine specs and bandwidth? try starting with nothing booting (holding down space bar can kill off some of the things that start ..do as you login in to your desktop).
Also are you asking for a lot of past history? that takes a long time. Not sure. Best of luck. I tried contacting esignal.

[eSignal_AveryH]

Hi Boshek and lparkh,

Before trying to guess what might be the problem, let ask a few questions;

When the Excel freezes up does it also freeze up the eSignal? In that it no long update the quote window or charts.

Have you tried the suggestion of repairing the excel? You could have problems with the Macros.

If so I would go on to the next steps.

There are a couple of things you could try.

1- Try running eSignal and Excel in Safe Mode. This will allow you to only open up the necessary applications for the OS to function. See if it runs more smoothly this way.
If so, we will know that it's another application conflicting with either the DM or Excel.

2- Try a new version of the SigTool which can be downloaded from FinTools. You also may want to try this will a new worksheet in excel just to confirm it not one of the other formulas or links which are causing the problem.

Lastly with the esignal and DM closed, Delete the winros.ini file. Located in C:\Windows directory
Relaunch the eSignal, you'll get a couple of errors like- Local eSignal Data Manager is unable to connect to Remote eSignal Data Manager. Click OK on the message open up the Data Manager and click on File-->Properties.
In the first box for eSignal CM IP Adress- type CM*.esignal.com
Place your username and password in the appropriate boxes and click OK. (See attachment) and Minimize the DM. DO NOT CLOSE

Try your test again and let us know if this correct the problem.

AveryH
eSignal Support

[boshek]

lparkh,

I managed to get the excel sheet to work (and keep working) today during the US day session. I went through the same steps of a "normal" boot up, loading winros first then excel then everything else afterwards.

I am not drawing any historical data, it is just a realtime monitor. I don't think it's a performance issue as my machine/bandwidth are both pretty good and the freeze happens even with minimal apps running.

It does sound like I m having a different problem to you. Good luck with that.

Avery,

It is only excel which freezes - everything else operates normally.

I now have it working again (even though I have to wait a bit for it to start) so I haven't tried to repair excel and I believe it is not an error in one of the formulas.

My eSignal CM IP Adress is already set to "CM*.esignal.com".

I will continue to try and see if there is any improvement.