WPF Application Errors and .Net Framework Repairs

Question

Background: I have a .Net 3.5 WPF \"Prism\"-based application running on Windows XP and Windows PosReady 2009 PCs. The app runs on PCs that are shut down every

Answer 1

We were finally able to get a hold of a production machine exhibiting this behavior and through a number of troubleshooting steps, including sending dump files to Microsoft, the issue was located.

The WPF Font Caching Windows service was occasionally getting into a corrupted state, causing a simple cache request to block indefinitely. This hang caused all of the behaviors described above in the our WPF application.

Simple solution: stop and disable the service. After disabling the service and rebooting the PC the service is no longer in use and we don't see any of these issues. In theory this leads to longer application load times, but we have seen zero negative impact.

Note that there are two versions of the service: 3.0.0.0 and 4.0.0.0. If your application is targeting .Net 3.0 or 3.5 you'll need to disable the 3 service, and if targeting 4.0+ you'll need to disable the 4 service.

Thanks to all for your comments and suggestions.