We’ve been having issues with VEXcode IQ on the computers in a lab for the entire school year. The software is having difficulty opening. Sometimes it opens to a grey screen with, “NW.JS” in black and it just freezes there, or it just doesn’t open at all. I’ve have dozens of students try for an entire 43 minute class period to open the software and it just never opens. Version is current. Any help or guidance you could offer to remedy this would be greatly appreciated.
If you know, how old is the computers in the lab. If it is a really old computer it never opens, if not old try deleting vex code and re download it. Maybe that could work.
Computers are only 1 year old… have tried removing and redownloading and re-install of VEX IQ several times, no change unfortunately.
We have seen this before, but it was some time ago, so things may have changed since then. I remember it was an issue with file system permissions and/or performance issues caused by anti-virus scanning the files that it is reading/writing as VEXcode is loading.
I would state by making sure VEXcode has read/write/execute permissions in the AppData\Local\Temp
and AppData\Local\VEXcode IQ
folders on the machines.
After that I would recommend that you check to see if the schools anti-virus scans files as the are being read from the drive or written to the drive. Unfortunately, the underlying software used to make VEXcode work on macOS and Windows embeds the core data in the application executable file and requires that the data is extracted for each run. This seems to cause some issues with some anti-virus programs, but we don’t know all the details of which ones or why. If your anti-virus does scan the files, see if it is possible to exclude the VEXcode install folder and the AppData\Local\VEXcode IQ
folder. I would recommend not excluding the temp for security.
Putting in an exception for these folders for our AV seems to have done the trick… thanks for the suggestion!