Troubleshooting RStudio IDE

RStudio IDE
1

Since upgrading to RStudio V 1.0.153 under Windows 10, I've encountered, even before executing any R code, an error message titled Rterm.exe - Entry Point Not Found

The procedure entry point deflateSetHeader could not be located in the dynamic link library C:\Users(really long path)\gtk\x64\bin\libgio-2.0-0.dll

Googling high and low hasn't helped and this error only occurs on one of my computers, all with the same (latest) versions of R and RStudio. Uninstalling and reinstalling RStudio hasn't helped. RStudio still works ok, it seems but the popup message reoccurs every few seconds and foghorns at me. It also prevents me from 'sleeping' the laptop when I want to move it.

Has anyone encountered this and, if so, what steps can I take. Thanks, and thanks for starting this forum!

Regards

David S

2

Sorry to hear you're having trouble! There's two possibilities I can think of here...

  1. Are you attempting to load any R packages on startup? Is it possible these R packages depend on external libraries that are no longer available? (The Rgtk2 package seems like a potential culprit, given that the path resolves within the gtk folder)

  2. It's also possible that your system PATH environment variable is set up in such a way that RStudio / R is loading system libraries from an unexpected location, and that's leading to weirdness down the way. What is the output of Sys.getenv("PATH") from an R terminal? (FWIW, it seems like there is a bit of discussion of this possibility here: https://rattle.togaware.com/rattle-install-troubleshooting.html)

Let me know if this points you in the right direction!

3

Thanks for the input. Here's what I did so far. In RStudio, I remove.packages('RGtk2'), remove.packages('cairoDevice') and exited. I restarted RStudio and install.packages('RGtk2') and exited. When I restarted RStudio the error did not occur. I then install.packages('cairoDevice'), exited and restarted and again the error did not occur. I then ran my R code that uses these libraries in a gwidgets 2 application and was told that gtk2 was missing and do I want to install it in a small popup window that, I think, is generated by R, not RStudio (I've seen this message before when using Tinn-R as my IDE). I said yes, gtk2 downloaded and installed, my R code ran and the error came back. So it appears that it's a mismatch in the gtk2 and either RGtk2 or cairoDevice libraries. At any rate, the bug is not fatal as my code runs fine, but the error message is 1) annoying, 2) obtrusive since it plops itself in the middle of my screen with a loud noise, and 3) prevents me from sleeping the computer until I shut down RStudio and then accept the error. I'll have to look into the gtk2 compatibility to try and track it down. Thanks for the help.

David S

4

Thanks for the feedback. RStudio's completion system may be the culprit here -- behind the scenes, RStudio will attempt to launch a separate R process and load these packages (in an attempt to figure out what completion items are produced by that package). It seems like this feature may be interacting poorly with these packages in your case, when the pre-requisite GTK libraries are not installed.

We'll take a look and see if we can improve how we handle this on our side as well.

5

Thanks Kevin. I'll let you know if I discover anything.

David