Power BI Desktop (End of April 2016 release) crashes on selection of tables

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone, 

Power BI Desktop has started to crash at the step of selecting the tables to be imported. It is a bit tempromental in these that it did not crash for most of the day but now its crashing again and again. It is even crashing for the Excel file that I was able to import earlier. 

Here's what I am trying to do;

Scenario 1 - Excel workbook 

Click on "Get Data > Excel" 

Select the workbook

Navigator window opens and lists two sheets within the workbook

I click on the first work book, it crashes.

Scenario 2 - Web page

Click on "Get Data > Web" and enter http://www.xe.com/

Navigator loads 2 tables, first being Document and 2nd the data table with values

I clicked on the first table (Document) it loaded the preview and it was fine

As soon as I click on the 2nd table, it crashed.

Interestingly, I had been able to import data from the Workbook in Scenario 1 and was working with it for half an hour, before I tried to import data from the web, Scenario 1, and that's when it crashed, and has been crashing since.

P.S: The first time it crashed was about in March 2016, when I tried to import data from Google Analytics, at the same step, same symptoms.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Kaz

[v-yuezhe-msft]

Hi Kaz,

I can successfully import data from www.xe.com via Power BI Desktop. According to the log you posted, I note that you are using the Power BI Desktop 2.34.4372.322 version, could you please install the latest update of Power BI Desktop(version 2.34.4372.501), then get data from XE web page and check if it is successful?

In addition, please run System File Checker tool to scan if there are corruptions in Windows system files.

Thanks,
Lydia Zhang

[Anonymous]

Hi @v-yuezhe-msft

Thanks for the reply. I was able to get around it when I open PBI desktop on a virtual machine with no other application running, and over there, everything works as expected. Apparently, some of the application on my laptop is using mshtml.dll, and possibly trying to access it at the same time, and that's causing grief to Power BI. That's the conclusion I have arrived. 

Thanks

Kaz

[ankitpatira]

@Anonymous I just replicated your scenario and I did not encountered any issues. To troubleshoot in powerbi desktop you can go to File -> Options & Settings -> Options -> Data Load -> Clear cache. Ensure Maximum allowed (MB) is at recommended level. Also go to Diagnostics and Enable Tracing and check logs.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply @ankitpatira. I restarted my computer, luanched Power BI & cleard the cache (7.78 MB). I am able to import data from the Excel workbook, but no luck with importing data from www.xe.com. It again crashed on me when I selected the second table. 

I have Windows 7 64 bit, i5 2.5 GHz with 6 GB of memory. I understand the memory is not quite a lot but in this scenario, I am not trying to do anything complicated. My memory utilisation stands at 62% at this time with Power BI opened, and Calendar data imported.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Kaz

[ankitpatira]

@Anonymous Can you try some other website and not XE? That way we will be able to isolate if the problem is with the data in table2 or with web connector in your instance.

[Anonymous]

@ankitpatira this is interesting

1 - I opened a new PBI with other data imported, and tried to import data from www.xe.com (I typed it in manually). It worked! data model was imported into PBI, I could see numbers. Great. I closed the applicaiton.

2 - I then read your post, launched a new instance and gave a try to get data from http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/currencies. It worked. 

3 - I then tried to import data from XE, and it crashed again, and ever since has crashed 4 times. 

It's turning out to be quite temperamental. I am lost here..

Thanks

Kaz

[Anonymous]

Here's the entry from event log

Faulting application name: PBIDesktop.exe, version: 2.34.4372.322, time stamp: 0x57206ec3
Faulting module name: mshtml.dll, version: 11.0.9600.18231, time stamp: 0x56b8f377
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000000000029f5c6
Faulting process id: 0x1de0
Faulting application start time: 0x01d1abf111528ee8
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Power BI Desktop\bin\PBIDesktop.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\mshtml.dll
Report Id: d3ec17a8-17e4-11e6-86f0-028037ec0200