EndNote X7.5 Freezing During Launch @ Authorizing or Retrieving Account Info

EndNote EndNote General
1

I have a customer who is using Win7 64bit, Office 2013 32bit, EndNote X7.5 on an older Dell Precision X7500 (6GB RAM, Xeon processor, 500GB hard drive with 120GB available).  She has just over 1100 items in her EN library, quite a few PDFs, many with images.  She synchronizes the account with EndNote online. She also views and marks up the PDFs within EndNote.

Problem 1 - During the startup phase of EndNote it freezes up in one of two phases and then eventually starts up.  The first phase it can freeze up in is when the synchronization is “Authorizing”.  The second is in the same phase where it is “Retrieving Account Info”.  

Problem 2 - There are time when Word and EndNote are both open and she goes to take notes or do mark up on the PDF, everything crashes and she has to reboot.  This has been less of an issue after cleaning out a lot of temp files and deleting Word’s data entry from the registry.

All apps involved are updated (EndNote, Office, Acrobat).  I edited the Word data registry by deleting it (I found several folks online that suggested this and it resolved their issues - it did resolve the issue of a big list of EndNote related temporary plugins showing up in Word).  I emptied every temp file availble. 

The freeze at startup continues to persist, although the total system reboot freeze has been less frequent.

2

Dear jameshw,

You might try running a repair of Office first, then run a repair of EndNote. Also, where is the users library located? Slowness and crashing can crop up if the library is on a server location or in a cloud folder such as Dropbox or Google drive (which we don’t recommed).

If the library is on a server share or in a cloud folder, you’ll want to move both the libraries’ enl file and data folder to the users local machine. Next use the “recover library” command under the tools menu in EndNote. After that, open the recovered library and see if the performance improves.

I hope this is helpful.

3

Thanks thewitt - Indeed, the library might live on a server (although not in a synched cloud drive folder).  It’s synchronized up to the EndNote cloud system which is where we hit the ‘authorizing’ sticking point.