I just paid for my upgrade from 12 to 13 and installed it. I have just under 14,000 fonts in the collection, some of them are legacy fonts, some even from CDs, that I keep for reference purposes, sort of like a font museum, separate from my licensed fonts. I have no outstanding entries in my “Registry Fixer”, or my “Invalid Font Resources” tools so they all seem to be free of corruption.
When I open MainType it defaults to my Installed Fonts folder containing 565 active fonts. I click on the second entry in the View window, “Adobe Arabic Italic” and MainType crashes. In fact, when I click on other fonts in the list, MainType crashes.
Honestly, I purchased the upgrade from 12 to 13 hoping for more stability but it is not more stable, perhaps less stable for me.
I am more than willing to share any data that will help you fix my problem, I very much want to be able to curate my collection uninhibited by these crashes.
Sorry for the rough first impression! From what you describe, MainType itself probably isn’t crashing—your video driver may be failing and it drags MainType down with it.
Quick test
Close MainType.
Run FmsConfig (you’ll find it in the Start-menu folder High-Logic → MainType).
Safe Mode disables previews, so if you can now browse the entire library—even the “Adobe Arabic Italic” entry—without any crashes, the culprit is almost certainly the graphics driver.
If it works in Safe Mode
Download and install the latest video/graphics driver for your GPU from the card or laptop maker’s website.
Re-enable previews (FmsConfig → switch from Safe Mode to Normal) and try again.
Let us know how this goes or if it still crashes in Safe Mode, and we’ll dig deeper together.
Erwin,
I am grateful for your quick response to my issue. I proceeded as you instructed.
I went into safe mode and it is stable!
I can click in the view menu between fonts and no crashes whatsoever.
I downloaded the latest video driver:
Nvidia GeForce 3080 Ti for Windows 11. I chose the “Game-Ready Driver” version 576.52 and installed it.
I turned FMS back to “Normal” mode for MainType and tried again.
Unfortunately it still crashes.
Do you think the Nvidia “Studio Driver” would fix the problem, or are there other things I should try now that I know it is the video driver? Is there a setting I can tweak?
L
MainType’s previews rely on plain Windows GDI. So when the preview pane asks Windows to draw a glyph outline, Windows passes the work to the display-driver stack; if that chain breaks, the whole process (and MainType with it) goes down. That’s why Safe Mode is perfectly stable.
The Studio branch might contain fixes that never reach the Game-Ready track. So yes, give that a try.
Erwin,
Thanks again for your suggestions.
I Implemented the Windows graphics tweaks, “HW-accelerated GPU Scheduling” was already enabled, and I added MainType.exe to the “Custom settings for applications”, selecting “high performance” for the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti.
Unfortunately these did not work after I installed the Nvidia Studio Driver graphics driver.
Event viewer did not yield any red errors for the time that I was testing MainType. It did have some .NET Runtime errors from before I started the tests.
Are there any other suggestions you may I have, that I may try?
The last lever worth pulling is to turn Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling off
If disabling that doesn’t help I’m afraid we’ve reached the end of what we can change from MainType’s side—the crash stems from something in the Windows-driver chain that we can’t influence. In that case the practical options are:
Keep working with MainType in Safe Mode (previews off) until a future Windows or NVIDIA driver update resolves it.
Roll back to an earlier NVIDIA driver that predates the issue, or open a support ticket with NVIDIA and include the fact that GDI preview rendering most likely triggers the crash.
I wish I had a cleaner fix, but those are the only viable paths left. Let me know the result of the GPU-scheduling test, and we’ll stay tuned for any driver updates that address it. Thanks for your patience!
I tried the turn Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling off idea and that did not work.
Could it perhaps not be related to the video driver?
I ask this because if I toggle off the “Toggle Font Preview” in the View window (eye icon with the red “no” symbol next to the eye), close the Characters window, and close the Sample window, so that none of the typeface glyphs are being rendered, and click around in the View menu on font entries, it eventually crashes as well (after about 2-4 times as opposed to one).
I know nothing about how MainType works but does that provide any clues?
You’re right—we can’t yet rule out an internal or font-specific issue, but without a crash report we’re blind.
Even with the Preview/Character/Sample panels closed, MainType still loads each font into Windows GDI. In Safe Mode it skips that step entirely—no font data touches the GDI pipeline—so the code-path is different.
Yes, I believe I cannot really run the software in Safe Mode because it would mean that I cannot see the fonts, which is the primarily what I use MainType for.
So the software is crashing but not generating a crash report. How do we get it to generate a crash report so we can see why my set up is not compatible with your software?
My set up is not uncommon: I run a PC with a 3080 Ti graphics card with now the latest Nvidia driver. I have two monitors, one running at 4K with the Windows scale set at 175% as a primary, with the other running at 2560x1440 and the Windows scale set at 100%.
During one test, I turned off the secondary monitor and switched the primary monitor’s scale to 100%. This did not fix the crashes.
I would like to know what I would do to solve this “Windows GDI” issue, since I have been using Nvidia drivers from 10 updates ago with the same crashing issue in MainType.
Is there a way for MainType to identify why it is crashing on my system? Please let me know if you need any other details about my set up that would be relevant. I run many art apps and other software and I am not experiencing regular crashes. They all tend to run quite stably.
Additional Note:
I am not a programmer, or super high level Windows guy, but I thought I would look in the registry for any instance of the word “MainType” and I came across this:
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\RADAR\HeapLeakDetection\DiagnosedApplications\MainType.exe
The LastDetectionTime entry, type REG_QWORD has the following data: 1db2aef7b4b24ea (133747821991634154)
I have no idea what this means, other than it looks like RADAR is detecting a memory heap leak. Thoughts?
That registry key is part of Windows’ built-in RADAR (Reliability, Availability, Diagnostics, and Recovery) system, specifically its Heap Leak Detection feature. Here’s what it means:
What it does
When an application exits, Windows can scan its heap for memory that was allocated but never freed. If it finds leaks, it logs a timestamp under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\RADAR\HeapLeakDetection\DiagnosedApplications\<exe>
so that you (or Microsoft) know which apps have had leaks and when.
The value you saw
The LastDetectionTime REG_QWORD is just a Windows FILETIME (100-ns ticks since January 1, 1601). It tells you the last time Windows diagnosed a leak in MainType—not that the leak is causing crashes today.
Impact on your crashes
HeapLeakDetection runs after an app exits, so it won’t trigger or prevent the crash you see when browsing fonts. It’s purely diagnostic and passive.
Your entry is dated 2024, 10, 30. You can safely ignore or clear that key if you wish, but it won’t change MainType’s behavior.
As a last resort, you can look for error information in these few places:
1. Windows Event Viewer
Press Win + R, type eventvwr.msc → OK
Windows Logs → System
Look for Source = “nvlddmkm” (the NVIDIA driver) or Event ID 4101/Timeout Detection and Recovery entries around the time of your MainType crash.
Windows Logs → Application
You can also filter here for .NET Runtime or Application Error entries.
2. Windows Error Reporting (WER)
Check C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportArchive and …\ReportQueue for crash reports named like AppCrash_MainType.exe….
Those folders often contain an XML and sometimes a hang or crash dump you can zip up.
3. Application Crash Dumps
High-Logic error reports are located under C:\ProgramData\High-Logic\Errors.
Windows may also write user-mode dumps to %LocalAppData%\CrashDumps.
4. NVIDIA Crash Reports
Some NVIDIA tools write to C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\NV_CrashReport\.
You can also open the NVIDIA Crash Report Manager in your Start menu (if installed) to browse/log recent GPU failures.
5. DXDiag System Report
Run Win + R, dxdiag, click Save All Information to get a snapshot of your GPU, drivers, and any detected problems.
Gather any relevant System/Application events or dump files from these locations and send them over. That data is the only way to pinpoint whether it’s truly a driver bug, a Windows GDI fault, or something in MainType itself.
Hi Erwin,
Thank you for all the good suggestions. I went through your list and here are the results:
No “nvlddmkm” in the log. One “.NET Runtime” error, but related to Bing Wallpaper.
I found a Report.wer. Will send it to you.
No “Crashdumps”
No Nvidia crash reports. I do not have the “Crash Report Manager”, but I can get it.
Generated a DXDiag report. Will send it to you.
I tried installing 13.0.0.1345, your latest update, and it still crashes, using the same steps to induce the crash as listed above in my previous post.
I then installed MainType 12.0.0.1288, as well as 12.0.0.1293, tried to induce the crash and it was, after many clicks on various fonts, completely stable!
I then tried to install 12.0.0.1318 and it crashed.
I do not have any other version between 12.0.0.1293 and 12.0.0.1318 to test, so hopefully that narrows it down for you, but somewhere between those two version is where the instability was introduced for my setup.
So it does seem likely it is something in MainType itself.
Give me download access other legacy version 12 updates and I can test them for you no problem!
Hi Erwin,
I’ve read the entire conversation you’ve had with Lt. Kernal thus far, concerning his crashing issues. My MainType 12.0.0.1340 also crashes habitually, and is specific to this one program on my shoestring Windows 11 machine. I’m glad you two are talking together, for my withered pea-brain at age 75 knows far less about computers than it used to when I was a graphics communicator back in the 80s-90s. A life-long lover of the typeface, though, and I would gladly buy v. 13 if MT would just quit crashing for heavens sake!! If and when you two (and I mean anyone and everyone at the High-Logic company) get this thing figured out, please let me know.
Erwin,
Would it not be a good idea to send me a link to MainType versions after 12.0.0.1293 (which is the one that was stable for me) so I can test them all, and give you an exact version number of when it started to crash for me?
With that information, it might be easier for you to figure out what code alterations were made between the two version to isolate the reason for this crash.
Those numbers are versions between 12.0.0.1293 and 12.0.0.1318.
Erwin,
I tried 12.0.0.1312 from your download and it worked very stably with my random scrolling and click tests in the View window. This is good news as we narrow it down.
Was there any releases between 1312 and 1318? If not, we have the threshold point, and hopefully this helps you isolate the code change that is causing this elusive bug!
I am so grateful we can work together to make MainType a rock-solid typeface curation app.
