I'm not sure if this is the same thing you're fighting with, but I've
fought with something similar over the past 5 years.
TS 4.0.x and 4.1.x (CentOS 7)
IconNMR settings:
Supervisor = enabled
Exit = disabled
I tested a bunch of different accounts and attempting to close TopSpin or
IconNMR would correctly give a message that the user isn't allowed to close
the program. That being said, there were occasional instances of the program
abruptly closing (both TopSpin and IconNMR), but it was not reproduceable
and I suspect it's related to a memory leak because I never seem to get
around to rebooting my computers and this would happen after several
months of up-time.
TS 4.3.x (CentOS 7)
IconNMR settings:
Supervisor = enabled
Exit = disabled
After upgrading to 4.3.0, students were accidentally closing TopSpin+IconNMR
several times a month. All the times that I was there to observe it, the users
were trying to click the minimize-window icon and accidentally clicked the
close-window icon and it would simply shut everything down without asking for
the admin password or giving the usual warning window that closing TS will
kill active processes, etc.
TS 4.4.x (CentOS 7)
IconNMR settings:
Supervisor = enabled
Exit = disabled
I updated to 4.4.0 as soon as it came out, hoping this would fix the problem
introduced in 4.3 (or maybe 4.2? I never had 4.2.x installed). But, with
4.4.x students were killing TopSpin+IconNMR several times each week! Eventually,
I figured out that changing the IconNMR setting of Supervisor fixed this problem.
IconNMR settings:
Supervisor = disabled
Exit = disabled
Unfortunately, with Supervisor = disabled, users can't open or process
spectra on the instrument computer (a mixed blessing - I'm always trying
to shoo students off the instrument computer and over to the data processing
computers, but there are times it's very useful to quickly check/edit things
on the instrument computer).
I'm now running 4.5.0 with these same settings. I haven't had a chance to
test if going back to Supervisor = enabled will bring back the better
behavior of 4.0 and 4.1
There's a completely different problem that locks up IconNMR with no way to
fix it other than using 'kill' from the command line to end all the topspin
related processes. If you have composite experiments available in the list
of allowed protocols in IconNMR, then there's a bug that's tickled by users
who use the mouse scroll wheel to navigate through the IconNMR window (thus,
this happens more often with users setting up a long queue of experiments
and then using the scroll whell to scroll to the top of their location so
they can submit it). If they use the scroll wheel while the mouse happens
to be hovering over an active (non-submitted) experiment drop-down menu,
this scrolls through the experiment list. If it happens to end on a composite
experiment and they submit the location without noticing this, IconNMR will
happily queue it up just fine, but the composite experiment is expanded into
the various steps. Then when IconNMR is working through this queued location
and reaches this unexpanded composite experiment, it simply freezes and
TS+IconNMR become completely unresponsive.
I haven't found any workarounds for this other than warning students about
the scroll wheel problem when I train them. Also note that I have not tested
this bug with TS 4.5, but it was definitely still a problem in 4.3 and 4.4
-Scott
Dr. Scott Burt
Teaching Professor
NMR Lab Manager
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Brigham Young University
C414 BNSN / C008A BNSN
Provo, Utah 84602-5700
Phone: (801) 422-2404
website: https://chembio.byu.edu/nmr-facility
email: scott.burt_at_byu.edu
________________________________
From: main_at_ammrl.groups.io on behalf of Fulton, Luke via groups.io
> Sent: Tuesday, December 2, 2025 8:29 AM
> To: main_at_ammrl.groups.io
> Subject: [AMMRL] Unexpected ICON Shutdown
Hi Everyone,
A periodic automation annoyance visited again today and I'm wondering if
anyone else has experienced the same issue or already found a fix.
I check the automation queue every evening for obvious red flags before leaving
the lab. Sometimes ICON closes unexpectedly overnight, or so I surmise
the following the morning. I'm stumped on how that's happening. There aren't
any associated error messages that I've seen. This morning there was notification
for a MICS update, but iirc that has appeared before without coinciding with
ICON disappearing.
-Windows 10 TS 4.4.0
-Automatic windows updates are turned off
-Confirmed the computer did not power cycle
-Exiting TopSpin is disabled while ICON automation run is active (several
hours of experiments completed last night without issue)
-nmrsu is the only account with permissions to stop the run or exit ICON
(afaik students have not obtained my password)
I've tested the settings for robustness multiple times. If it's a user input
error then I'll confess that whatever they're doing exceeds my imagination.
The issue is infrequent, so I can roll with software crashes if that's the
underlying cause.
I'm all ears for hypotheses or suggestions of available clues I may have overlooked.
Kind regards,
Luke
Luke Fulton, PhD
CHEM BLDG R003
NMR Core Facility Director
Unit 3060
COR2E & Department of Chemistry
55 N Eagleville Road
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06279
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Received on Tue Dec 02 2025 - 09:58:33 MST