Problem with locked ICE compound (HELP!)

[Mootzoid]

Hi,

I have an emFluid2 customer who seems to have a really strange problem I never heard of before:
One (or more) of the emFluid2 compounds are somehow locked (file extension "*.compound.lock").

Two questions:
1) Has anybody ever heard of that or know something about that ?
2) Why would a compound file be locked ? It's just an ordinary text file.

Thanks!
Eric

[Hirazi Blue]

Be warned: this won't help you a bit!!!

AFAIK the topic of locked compounds seems to have been mentioned exactly once in the mythical realm of the Mailing List. However, before you click this link, please be aware, that this Mailing List topic only contains one post, mentioning the problem and asking for help without any obvious kind of reply
(as in: under the same topic)

[Mootzoid]

Thanks, Hirazi Blue!
I'll contact him, maybe he now knows more about that problem.
Cheers,
Eric

[xsisupport]

.lock files are temporary files created when a process (like xsi.exe) opens a file through the Windows API.
Usually you'll never see the .lock files. But if something happens to interrupt the file access (eg a network problem), you can get .lock files left around, which causes a sharing violation the next time a process tries to access the file.

You might want to try Process Monitor or Process Explorer to see what is going on.

[Mootzoid]

@ xsisupport: Thanks for the information!

[xsisupport]

A possible workaround is to make the folder read-only so xsi.exe cannot write a lock file.
Then there can be no concurrent access to the lock file ;-)

[Mootzoid]

Hey, that's a pretty clever idea, hadn't thought about it Thanks!
I will pass it on to the guy who has that ".lock"-file-problem.

PS: a guy had bought a site license of emFluid2 (workstations + rendernodes) for his company and suddenly this problem came up. I guess it happened when he sent a scene to his render farm: several rendernodes started XSI at the same time, and two or more XSI application searched the common network workgroup for addons, simultaneously trying to read the ".compound" files.