Hi Tracy,

Yes, here’s what we think is happening. When Chimera writes out a session file, it writes it out to a temporary file and then moves that file to the desired final name. It does this to prevent destroying an older, good session file if there is some error encountered while saving the new session. So, the “file with an odd name” that you saw is the temporary file. Chimera wrote that out successfully and that’s why it worked when you opened it. The problem is that between the time it finished writing the file and the time it tried to move it to the final name (which isn’t much time!) some program running on your machine started reading it, resulting in the error message about “being used by another process”. Now, we don’t really know what the other mystery process is. it is most likely a virus scanner or some other security software that looks a every new file created on your machine.

If that rings any bells, perhaps you can configure the problematic program to not try to scan files with a .py suffix…

—Eric

Eric Pettersen

UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

On Apr 19, 2018, at 3:26 PM, Tracy Nixon <btn1@psu.edu> wrote:

Hi Joel,

I noticed I have a similar problem as you posted using Chimera on Windows, with saving a session giving the error:

WindowsError: [Error 32] The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process

In my case, using win10 and the current chimera as of today, the program writes out a file that is of odd name, even though I get the error message.

If I simply rename the file to something.py and open it from Chimera it works as it should.

Sincerely,

Tracy

--
B. Tracy Nixon
Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
332 S. Frear Lab
Penn State University
University Park, PA 16802
USA
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814 863 7024 (fax)
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