Hi Sketchup community. For 2 years now, some of my menu items are greyed out after sometimes 30 minutes of modelling, up to even 4 or 5 hours straight and than I see certain right click context menu items greyed out. Because I use and have so many plugins, each time I load my sketchup model, it takes 5 minutes to load upon opening sketchup. To get around this waiting time, I always have 2 files open, when 1 fails, I use the other and open another sketchup file while I’m continuing to work. This has been a huge frustration and of course having two sketchup files open all the time slows down my computer…
Has anyone (developers or anyone else) found any solutions to this problem? I’ve been dealing with this for 2 years, also reading about other users who have had this problem and nobody has managed to solve this yet…
I think this has to do with a certain plugin but I do not know for sure and I certainly do not want to or should not have to spend probably months uninstalling and going one by one through the 50 some plugins I have…
I have a hunch this has to do with always keeping all plugins updated, but I believe this is not true also as I have been dilligent about this, fairly dilligent anyways.
Would love any insight if anyone has figured something out… Thanks.
This has been going on for 10 years??? @Fredo6 do you have any idea what’s happening here? The person in this post mentioned your name. @eneroth3 , anyone else? 10 years. 10 whole years and this problem STILL continues. Why?..
Hello.
You probably have Lost much much more Time working like this for two years than trying to find the guilty plugin, even if you have 50+ of them.
You Ask why the problem still continues and yet you don’t uptade your plugins, just because “you don’t believe” it will fix anything.
Stop Being lazy, just do !
My Bad if I didn’t read right. You should start over with a clean install, no plugin, and install wisely the ones you really need, making sure they are marked as Being compatible with your SketchUp version.
Some plugins are not kept updated by their authors, so it might happen that while it was working with a previous SketchUp version, it still loads in the latest but gets unexpected behaviours like the one you get.
Start with the ones that are available on the official extension “store” and marked as working with 2021.
Then, if others are only available from other sources (such as sketchucation), check on forums if they have feedbacks from other users in case they did not get any recent update
Although a good suggestion, I shouldn’t have to limit myself to using plugins that are for 2019 for example where I use 2021. I should just be able to use plugins for my 2021 version, or a plugin that was updated for 2020, or 2019, or 2018, 2017, 2016 even. I think that’s limiting to only use plugins that are updated to work with a current version.
I’ve done the clean install and ran as system admin numerous times over the years. I’ll perhaps try that again though…
Good suggestion with your last comment. I’ll check that out. I have however been reading on greyed out threads and found nothing useful. This has been happening for too long and to too many people. It’s been bothering me a lot lately and just getting tired of this over and over again, you know? Hopefully you don’t know, but I do…
Maybe using SketchUcation Plugin and Extensions managers will help, when you have so many plugin tools. You can make groups and just use the ones for the tasks you are on. I haven’t heard of these complaints on the forums (and I DO check in here too often!). It sounds like some other old software I have that certain things stop working and I have to relaunch, but not SketchUp. It just freezes (half joking).
You make groups of plugins and activate them when you just need some for say, “organic”, “terrain”, “house building”. You can activate all, of course, when you want. And you can leave some inactivated and just activate for the rare occasion.
The only thing that gets me is the separation of “plugins” and “extensions” but that is not SketchUcation’s fault. You often have to open both windows to get what you want.
I think it is fair to point out that SketchUcation was working on this before Trimble made the Extension Warehouse , Extension Manager (current version), and easier loading of extensions / plugins.
The gray-out of menus is due to exhausting the menu resources at system level. At least one known case is when a plugin use UI::Command in context menus because UI::Command creates a system object which is not released when the menu is closed.
For my plugins, this problem has been transient in some old versions and is now fixed since long.
Thank you for your repsonse. I just wish there was a clear solution to this. The program is essentially broken in a way so long as this problem persists. I know I’m not the only one dealing with this issue… Seriously frustrating, 10 years later and nobody has figured this out…
SketchUp shouldn’t stop working even if extensions through suboptimal things at it. Even if this proves difficult to fix, the workaround needs to be documented.
I haven’t seen this myself but that’s probably because I personally like to keep down the amount of stuff in the UI. @Fredo6, do you have a short code example for the workaround?
Long time ago, I tried to use UI::Command to add item to the contextual menu, probably because they have a tip displayed in the status bar explaining what the menu does. It just happens that as a side effect, the Sketchup menus get grayed out after a while. I reverted to add_item in subsequent versions (more than 5 years ago).
Why creating a large number of UI::Command provokes a gray out of menu? No idea…!
There may be other causes to this menu issue. I just document the one I know.
