ExifTool just recently started crashing my XP laptop

[georgejones314]

ExifTool recently started crashing my computer. Runs to output some lines then crashes (shuts off the computer).

If I've been using my computer for a while without a reboot it crashes sooner. With a fresh reboot it crashes after outputting about 9500 lines.  Mine is an old XP with 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM.

I recurse about 120K podcasts across two external hard drives, looking for any podcast having an entry in the $track field. Here's the batch output line:
G:\exiftool.exe -if "$track" -L -q -q -s3 -p $track~$directory/$filename %buffer%>>"G:\ZQZQ.m3u8"

This issue just started, so either I've finally reached a magic number of podcasts in my library, or maybe it's a recent upgrade of EXIFTool, or my machine is getting cranky, it was the recent switch to daylight savings time or something else.

I get around this error by running two separate EXIFTool batches, one for each drive. Inconvenient.

Any thoughts?

Thanks
RKO

[Phil Harvey]

If I were you I would run some memory and disk diagnostics.

Also, you can eliminate the possibility of a problem due to an ExifTool update by downloading an older version.  Versions back to 9.40 still exist on the ExifTool web server.

- Phil

[georgejones314]

Sorry I didn't get back earlier. The crashing has been sooo variable it's been hard to reach any general answer ... I've tried all the usual tricks-diagnostics and more often than not it still crashes. But every once in a while not.

If I come up with anything more definitive I'll report back.

K