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Hi,
I recently updated to the latest version of DisplayCAL (3.8.8) and done new calibrations for my monitors, which I haven’t done for a while (but I’ve been using the Profile Loader with old profiles). Ever since I did that, the Profile Loader seems to be duplicating its process on its own:
I’ve yet to discover under which circumstances does that happen. This is after leaving my PC for about 8 hours – it should autosleep after 30 minutes, but it seems like it doesn’t, and counting the Profile Loader instances, it seems like it might be related as there seems to be an instance for every 30 minutes. But I think I’ve seen the Profile Loader duplicate even without reaching the sleep timeout in the past few days.
I’ve tried uninstalling DisplayCAL and reinstalling it, but it didn’t seem to solve the issue.
I’m running up to date Win 10 64 Pro and nVidia 1660Ti with the (current) 441.12 driver. I never had any issues with the Profile Loader before updating DisplayCAL to 3.8.8.
(Also, I only just noticed I posted it in General instead of Support where it probably belongs. So I apologize. I would delete it and post it there, but I don’t see any option to do that 🙁 )
Are you sure these are actual instances and not just stale tray icons (Windows has a habit to sometimes not update the tray when a program exits, even when the program cleans up after itself by calling Shell_NotifyIcon – in that case, hovering the icons with the mouse cursor will make them disappear)? The profile loader will relaunch automatically on resume from sleep or at 4am (whichever comes first) to circumvent a Windows 10 memory leak that has been introduced by infinite cesspit that is the Win10 1903 update.
It looks like in your case, the system wakes from sleep shortly after it goes to sleep.
Yes, they are actual instances. They are listed as individual instances in Task Manager, and I can right click on every single one of them to quit them. I’m familiar with the “stuck icon” issue and that’s definitely not the case here.
But if the Profile Loader is automatically relaunching on resume and/or at 4AM, that might probably explain it, even the case when it seemed to duplicate for me while I was using the PC without it going to sleep, since I work nights. I’ll check tonight what happens.
Never had a problem before updating to current DisplayCAL version, though.
It looks like you’re not using Windows Defender but a 3rd party security product. If that product includes a firewall, make sure you don’t block connections to localhost, otherwise the profile loader won’t be able to see that it is already running!
Btw, also please attach logfiles (see documentation) and enable task history in Windows task scheduler.
I guess the firewall tip might be it, it never occured to me to look there, especially since I didn’t change anything related to DisplayCAL or Profile Loader lately. But turns out I somehow had Profile Loader set to be blocked from all communication for almost a year without even realizing (might’ve been a misclick for all I know, because I certainly don’t remember doing that intentionally, nor can I come up with a reason to do so), so I just unblocked it and I’ll see if it helps. If not, I’ll get the logs and Scheduler task history. If yes, then I’ll just post a follow up.
Also I can confirm the application duplicated exactly at 4 am.
And since I also wanted to test if the PC not going to sleep was related to Profile Loader itself, I disabled it and also set Windows to handle the color profile loading…and while the PC did go to sleep fine, I also had two instances of (deactivated) Profile Loader running after I came back. Which I kinda do understand now, knowing about how it is handled in Task Scheduler, but having an app start itself even though it’s deactivated and not even running is still kinda not ideal, IMO. I see now that the whole Task Manager thing was mentioned in the 3.8.7 release notes, but maybe it should be mentioned more prominently?
Anyway thank you for the help so far, let’s see what happens next.
If you want to disable the profile loader from launching or restarting, you have to do it via Windows task scheduler. I recommend against it though, as the Windows built-in calibration loader has its fair share of problems that are very unlikely to ever get fixed, as they have existed since its inception (accuracy loss and wrong scaling due to truncating 16 bit values to 8 bit, inability to use correct profile associations in multi-display setups when one or more of the displays are disabled, doesn’t restore calibration).
I see now that the whole Task Manager thing was mentioned in the 3.8.7 release notes, but maybe it should be mentioned more prominently?
I see no reason for that. The system is designed to be unobtrusive, and if you don’t block the profile loader, should work exactly as intended. I’ve added a fallback way to determine if the process is already running for the next version though just in case.
