Watchermainthread

Joey wrote:Also, Sometimes when I switch on the phone, it says "App closed - Main" but this happens rarely.

Well firstly, that's just something annoying in Symbian that sometimes happens, I get that too. Just switch off and start again.

But about the "Watchermainthread", well, that sounds like there's a dodgy program installed on your phone thats running at startup and keeps getting shut down or shuts itself down for some reason. Check your Manager to make sure there's nothing unexpected there.

Joey wrote:I DID search the forum/internet first, before someone tells me to!
But I found one thread on here about it, which wasnt very informative, so-

I have a problem on the N-Gage, When I first switch on the phone, after starting up, a message comes up saying "app closed - Watchermainthread" This has happened the last 4 times I've switched on the phone, and although it hasnt seemed to cause any problems apart from the annoying message, Im concerned, because I dont know what it is, or why it keeps coming up.
Does anyone know what this is, or how to stop it?

Also, Sometimes when I switch on the phone, it says "App closed - Main" but this happens rarely.

I also just started getting the message yesterday 16 October 2007
App. closed:
WatcherMainThread
USER 11
(with a red exclamation on the right side)

I have had my phone for a year or so now and have had no problems.
I was not doing anything special yesterday, have done no updates etc etc.
The phone hung when I went to sync first thing yesterday so I rebooted. Ever since this idiot message pops up approximately every 5 seconds. I have to press OK to clear it.
The phone is practically unusable.

I have researched the web and other people are experiencing this issue but no solutions are recommended.
I have deleted all my emails as one suggestion was that the system was out of memory.
I have reset the phone back to factory settings - all to no avail.

I tried to update the OS (which I have done before without problems) but the phone will not connect to my PC - which may be related to the problem.

Any suggestions how to resolve this problem would be appreciated

Alex

This problem just started afflicting my E61 within the last few weeks as well. Unfortunately, I have not found any answer or solution in extensive Google searching.

What I did find, however, is that this is a *HUGE* and *SEVERE* problem!

My E61 had been the most amazing piece of telecomms gear I ever touched, until this malady afflicted it. The problem has several different symptoms, one of which is the continuously recurring WatcherMainThread error message. Another serious symptom is the partial or complete loss of SMS send and/or receive capability.

I have determined that the display of said error message occurs because a utility (in my case, SysExplorer) has been installed, which enables the display of system errors. Note that Y-Tasks also shows the same thread dying at the same frequency. Some users have reported a progressively increasing memory leak accompanying this problem; I have not specifically noticed that, possibly because I have rebooted the device so many times.

I can hear the recommendations now: reformat the device, upgrade the firmware, etc...been there, done that. I upgraded from v1.x to v2.x soon after it became available, late in 2006. I restored a backup onto the device from memory card, reinstalled the necessary apps, and had virtually no problems for a year. Suddenly, this problem showed up last month. I finally decided to break down and reformat the internal memory, and not restore from a backup in case something was corrupted, and the problem returned almost immediately.

I then decided to upgrade to the latest v3.x firmware, which I had not done before because everything worked so well (!). I did this about a week ago, again reformatting the internal memory afterward, and not restoring from any backups. I started from scratch with clean installs of all the apps I wanted, and copied the contacts from another phone. I believe it took less than a week for the problem to return. I have now switched my main SIM to a 6682, because I cannot accept losing text messages!

I think this is something more fundamental than simply an S60 3rd Edition bug. Wait, obviously it is, since the original post predates 3rd Edition! My searching turned up sporadic mentions of similar problems in earlier S60 devices, and even in UIQ devices. There are extensive comments about it affecting the E61, E61i, and some other 3rd Edition devices. It seems to be totally independent of carrier, as it spans continents. One user reported having the same problem with SIMs from three different carriers. Many have reported returning their devices for flashing and even replacement, and none of those measures corrected the problem more than temporarily.

I am extremely disheartened by this. Yes, my nickname came about because I have been a great fan of Nokia's products. The E61 was absolutely fabulous. That is, until this problem, which is apparently known to Nokia, but which has not been fixed. It may be a more fundamental problem in Symbian itself.

One victim commented that he changed his device to stop setting the clock automatically from the network after a reformat, and that it helped the problem. I have been puzzling over this...what kind of software failure mechanism (I am TOTALLY convinced that it is not hardware) could cause a device to work beautifully for a year, including accumulating nearly 2000 SMS messages, and then suddenly choke? More mysteriously, how can the same device then choke in a matter of hours or days after a clean reformat? I suspect that it is related to something like a buffer or register overflow because of the date being a larger value, or possibly some accumulating file or value which is not actually overwritten by a reformat (like the life timer).

Please, someone, find an answer to this problem, or at least let other people know that this problem exists! I don't want to envision a conspiracy to make a device become aggravating and unusable after a certain amount of time, prompting the user to replace it with something new. I would think that such a plan would backfire...I paid $500 for a Nokia device in large part because I had such good luck with and performance from previous Nokia models. It should be noted that, if this problem is not resolved in a satisfactory and timely manner, I may have to look elsewhere. In saying that, I am being far more generous than many of the victims in the various discussions I have found about this problem...

Even i have faced the same problem from last 3 days. Infact it is very very very annoying as i have to repeatedly reboot my phone to recieve sms and have constantly click on error message.

i have recently changed my Memory Card to 2 GB Scan Disc MMC for my Sony P990i and i guess Memory Card is causing the problem, as when i removed my memory card, everything worked perfectly fine and when i re-inserted it, problem came back again.

In fact, i removed and inserted me mory card 4-5 times and as of now, my phone is working fine............but god knows till when.

Others, who are facing the same prblem, revert which brand and capacity Memory Card are they using and is this way solving the problem

~
Sumit Jain

Here we go again. A few weeks after my previous post, the problem disappeared all by itself. I happened to try my E61 with a spare prepaid SIM, and it didn't act up, so I put my primary SIM in it and it was fine for about 2 months. Then, yesterday, the same problem came back again! Note that I did not reformat or anything; it went from bad to good to bad again with no significant change on my part.

The memory card idea is interesting, but does not appear to be connected to the problem on my E61. I originally used a 1 GB SanDisk miniSD with the device, never with any problems. I upgraded to a 2 GB SanDisk miniSD some months before the WatcherMainThread problem began (and have had no problems with that card either). After reading the last post, I powered it up with no memory card, and the problem was still there. Just as before, the problem also affects it with several different SIMs.

Another interesting point is that, just before the problem appeared to go away, I had called Nokia USA support to see what they might be able to reveal: nothing helpful, as expected. Particularly odd was the seeming admission that the problem is known to them, but the emphatic clarification that such problems only ever affect unlocked, unbranded devices, and never operator-branded devices. Say what?!? By far the vast majority of problems I have heard of have been with operator-crippled firmware limitations and instability. I paid $500 to avoid all of those problems, and that plan worked very well for over a year.

So, can others experiencing this problem perhaps post whether their affected devices are carrier-branded or unbranded? I really doubt that there is a connection in this case, but who knows. I still suspect something related to time and/or date, or an accumulating value somewhere...

Another interesting twist which may very well be related to this problem started happening right around the beginning of the year (in the middle of the otherwise good period after it 'fixed itself'😉. I started getting a message about an invalid multimedia access point any time the device tried to receive an MMS message. I checked and reconfigured the settings a number of times, both manually and OTA (from both Nokia's site and my carrier's site), but never with any success. I rarely ever use MMS, and don't specifically subscribe to it, so I thought it might have been a provisioning change on the account, but it wasn't worth checking into. The only reason I got attempted messages which alerted me to the issue is that my carrier's email-to-SMS gateway has a habit of sending some such messages as MMS rather than SMS (apparently if they exceed a certain size from what I read somewhere). Anyway, I never checked with the carrier, but noticed that MMS reception started to work fine the moment I put my SIM in a 6682, just as I did the last time the WMT (OK, why not abbreviate this problem?!?) issue reared its particularly ugly head.

So, on what devices are people seeing this problem? Branded or unbranded? Locked or unlocked? Is there any pattern to the time/date of the failure? Anyone else had it magically cure itself, only to magically return (much like the ancestor of the problem which started this thread)?

I think I may have figured out what triggered this problem. It's not conclusive yet, but it seems to be more than coincidence.

Before I forget to mention it, it turns out that I have had network operator time disabled for over a month...that was one proposed solution in a discussion about this issue.

I realized that something happened immediately preceding the first occurrence of this issue, and the same thing happened before the most recent occurrence: I sent a text message to a contact with a very long name (the longest in my contacts list, AFAIK).

FWIW, my contacts are all stored with the number only in the 'mobile' field, and with the entire name in the 'last name' field, as that is how they were originally imported from my main SIM. I have kept the same pattern for all new contacts, in case I ever want to export them the same way. Interestingly, that happens to solve the issue which some people have reported of being unable to search for strings in any part of a contact name, but that is another story.

So, could it be that something in the OS is choking on a particularly long name string when an SMS message is either sent to or received from such a contact? The pattern was the same both times: I sent a message to that contact, and never received a reply (which he sent both times). I subsequently had intermittent or no SMS functionality from then on, and eventually had the WMT crash issue.

This seems like more than a coincidence... I hope to obtain another E61 in the near future, and when I do I will try to replicate the problem. It is difficult to tell what state my current device is in, and I do not plan to go through the reformat and reinstall routine again until I know more about this issue. Not to mention that I didn't have to the last time; it 'fixed itself' and was fine for several months.

Any thoughts?

I cannot believe it, but that appears to have been the cause of the problem!

Today I edited the contact mentioned above, shortening the name (in the 'last name' field) considerably. Within seconds, the E61 reported that I had received a new message. There was the reply from that contact, which I had never seen previously.

The interesting part is that the device was still using a different SIM than the one from which I sent the initial message (and to which the reply was sent)! That proves that the message was already stored in the phone's memory somewhere, but that it was stuck, and eventually caused the WMT problem.

So, now with my primary SIM again, the WMT issue is gone, and the device sends and receives SMS messages fine!

Let's hope it never returns...

Ive been seeing this watchermainthread issue for a while now. and its quite annoying....I have the SE P1i. I also had the P990 in which i had the same problem. THey both run symbian uiq3.

Lots of my friends have the same phones and none of them see this problem. It is something only i am seeing. At first i thought it was related to my emails on the phone. Since i used IMAP i figured it was using alot of memory. I did a master reset, and the problem went away until recently.

I do have long contact names so i figured that is it!!! but it wasnt....i deleted all my contacts on the phone.....and still saw the same problem. Ive restarted a bunch of times....and still the same thing.

Also if i change my phone to flight mode....the message stops.....and as soon as i switch back to phone mode...it shows up every 10 seconds..

Also i get a small message that says Dump File Created....anyone know where that dump file would be so i could look into this a bit further?

Just out of curiosity how many characters were in the last name field?

By the way my phone is unlocked and unbranded....
anyone have ANY other suggestions?

The fact that you are seeing it on SE devices would seem to confirm that it is more of a fundamental Symbian thing than a Nokia/S[eries]60 thing.

The contact name which I used to have in the last name field had 33 characters. The field itself accepts 50 characters. 33 sounds suspiciously like 1 more than 32, which is a power of 2, and a common limit in other contexts...

Since I renamed the field to just his name (13 characters), the problem has not come back, and I have successfully exchanged SMS messages with him. Note that I have not had to reset the E61 or change anything else.

That's interesting that flight mode fixes the problem...I don't believe I tried the offline profile (flight mode equivalent on E61).

From what I have read, WatcherMainThread (which I believe to be just that, the main thread of the watcher.exe process) is kind of a catch-all process which is involved in various parts of the internal Symbian OS goings-on. Any of a variety of anomalies would likely cause it to show similar symptoms. I'm sure that most programs (including internal system software) are checked pretty thoroughly to make sure that they behave, but there is so much complexity in these devices that it is virtually impossible to test every conceivable combination of conditions.

Possibly this might give a clue as to what could cause watcher.exe to choke. Checking the running processes with Best TaskMan shows that watcher.exe has these capabilities:

ReadDeviceData
WriteDeviceData
NetworkServices
LocalServices
ReadUserData
WriteUserData

Your device probably has a different specific issue causing the same effect. Perhaps it is an unusually long email address, or something similar.

Sorry I can't help with the dump file, as I have never seen that message (or any reference to it anywhere else).

Reference the above, thanks for all the advice on the forum. I suddenly developed this problem yesterday with my SE P1i after months of entirely trouble free opereation.

The problem manifested itself with a windowed (half screen) warning but despite the presence of a "Continue" button, the only way to remove it was to close the window using the "X". If left undone, it would take several presses of the "X" to close the window, indicating an ongoing problem which would not resolve automatically.

I noted also via the task manager that when the problem arose both the "Contacts" and "Messaging" services were active, though I had not called these up. Ending the services worked temporarily but on getting another error I looked again and the "Messaging" service had jumped back into life.

I couldn't figure out what the problem was so taking the advice on this thread I removed the memory card I had installed, a SanDisk 512MB item. I only had music on it, so no big deal.

Result - trouble free operation once more plus a text message from a friend (contact name length = 32 chars) the moment I got back on line. This indicates there may be two connected problem areas but I don't have time to investigate right now.

Look forward to hearing more about this.

since my last post on 5th Jan, i have not faced ths problem.........but reading some of the responses by other people, it seems its a major issue delaing with either Contacts, Messaging or Memory Card or a combination of these together.............and i m worried tht my P990i wud be reduced to a mere brick, if ths problem comes again ..................

Just trying to be cautious, befor it affects my phone again 😉

people, kindly post any views or othr related stuff founf on ne othr forums .......

Interesting - I had this problem. After reading the posts here I finally worked out what the problem was. Thanks to the earlier posts.

Basically one of my contacts had two many characters caused by me not locking my phone. Basically the contact had klj;kljkljl;joinlknjohn. When that contact tried to text me my phone fell over. I changed his name back to john and when I restarted I got a text message from him and my phone is fine now. very strange indeed but all better now.

hope this help and thanks to the previous posters

I have been using a P990i for over a year now. Some nitty gritty issues, but mostly can work around. After all, its a great phone, very difficult to find a form factor like this anymore (pen, keyboard, and number pad).

I just hit this same WatcherMainThread bug recently. And thx to this thread, I can confirmed that mine had the same issue. A SMS text was coming against an address book entry with long name. An interesting point to note is that, memory available seems to play a part as well. One morning, I kept getting the WatcherMainThread error coming up every 10 secs, and just kept going until I switch off the radio (flight mode), or the phone hangs. I then cleaned up the sms txt folders, and only got 1 WatcherMainThread error instead of repeatedly when I restarted the phone. But then no sms txt can get in, until the offending one somehow arrived (the one with long contact name). I then fixed the phone book entry, and now the phone is fine again.

Great!!
Thanks a lot n0k1a!!!!!
I resolved my WatcherMainThread problem on my N71!
Thank u very much!
Three monthes ago I changed the name of a my friend in my contact list from "Ninja Atalarico" to "Ninja Atalarico The King of ThePussy" and this causes my problem!
Now I've renamed it back to "Ninja Atalarico" and any WatcherMainThread message come out!
I thought to destroy my phone, throwing it more far than possible, in the main square of my town (Ravenna, Italy): now I'll continue to use my N71!

Thanks again!
Lobo

n0k1a wrote:The fact that you are seeing it on SE devices would seem to confirm that it is more of a fundamental Symbian thing than a Nokia/S[eries]60 thing.

The contact name which I used to have in the last name field had 33 characters. The field itself accepts 50 characters. 33 sounds suspiciously like 1 more than 32, which is a power of 2, and a common limit in other contexts...

Since I renamed the field to just his name (13 characters), the problem has not come back, and I have successfully exchanged SMS messages with him. Note that I have not had to reset the E61 or change anything else.

That's interesting that flight mode fixes the problem...I don't believe I tried the offline profile (flight mode equivalent on E61).

From what I have read, WatcherMainThread (which I believe to be just that, the main thread of the watcher.exe process) is kind of a catch-all process which is involved in various parts of the internal Symbian OS goings-on. Any of a variety of anomalies would likely cause it to show similar symptoms. I'm sure that most programs (including internal system software) are checked pretty thoroughly to make sure that they behave, but there is so much complexity in these devices that it is virtually impossible to test every conceivable combination of conditions.

Possibly this might give a clue as to what could cause watcher.exe to choke. Checking the running processes with Best TaskMan shows that watcher.exe has these capabilities:

ReadDeviceData
WriteDeviceData
NetworkServices
LocalServices
ReadUserData
WriteUserData

Your device probably has a different specific issue causing the same effect. Perhaps it is an unusually long email address, or something similar.

Sorry I can't help with the dump file, as I have never seen that message (or any reference to it anywhere else).