Notepad++ freezes if file is not avaiable any more

[Joachim Friedrich]

Hi Notepad++ Team,

thanks for your great work!

I have the following issue:
Several files are opened from a foreign WebDav location (connected through VPN). When I disconnect the vpn, before I close all the files from the foreign network location and go back to Notepad++, Notepad++ freezes.

Event a restart of Notepad++ is problematic, due to the session list the problem is still there.
I have to open session.xml and delete all entries.

Any idea how I can solve this?

Regards,
Joe

[gstavi]

There is not much you can do other than some obvious:

1. Try very hard to remember to close files in NPP before disconnecting VPN.
2. Consider disabling auto session save so NPP will start empty next time.
3. Consider disabling monitoring of external file modification.

Basically NPP just try to open the file’s absolute path.
The very long delay is because Window is trying to give the network a chance to “recover”. Network timeouts are very long and since it happens over and over again it is effectively a freeze.

Depending on the file path that you provide to NPP you may be able to mitigate some of the effect.
Don’t use absolute network path: \\host\path\name.
Use either network mapped drive or subst drive letter.
Then if you completely unmap or subst -D the drive letter, Windows may provide NPP with faster failure result.

In theory maybe NPP could add some extra test to see if a drive letter is currently valid but don’t count on any quick fix.