Power BI Desktop crash with Live connection

[pmcmonag]

When working on a report 'connected live to the PBI dataset' everytime I hit refresh the desktop instance freezes and have to force close/open PBI. Is this a known bug?

On the May 2021 release and have noticed this for a while in previous releases. There are sometimes it works, but majority of the time not. 

thanks

[AnonymousPerson]

Anybody who says this is fixed in the April 2022 release just got lucky that time.

I had to forcibly kill Power BI Desktop 3 times yesterday.

I'm in the habit now of saving before I refresh... Not expecting a fix anytime soon since MS somehow cannot reproduce the issue.

[itchyeyeballs]

I'm wondering how many different support teams are "working" on this at Microsoft, we have spent hours reproducing the issue and capturing traces of the last 3 months.

There seems to be two issues:

1 - Something breaking the connection to the service
2 - Power BI desktop fails to deal with the issue and hangs.

Excel also has issue 1 but displays an error and then allows the user to reconnect.

I suspect issue 1 may have lots of different network-related issues and be hard to solve, however, I don't understand why MS can't modify PBI Desktop to gracefully deal with the issue. 

[jnickell]

@itchyeyeballs I would agree on the improvements around error handling.  I created this idea after I hit a dead end with support in March.  

Votes wouldn't hurt 🙂

https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=80309426-f5b1-ec11-826e-281878de9501

[itchyeyeballs]

Voted although basic error handling feels like a core functionality requirement rather than an idea for an enhancement 😉

[Gebelecus]

In my case the problem does not occur anymore so some improvement has happened in latest Power Bi Desktop update(s).

But it seems based on many other comments here that there is still some use case(s) or certain special condition still causes an issue apparently so the fix seems to be either partial OR there is some other root cause causing the similar symptom.

[itchyeyeballs]

Just to confirm, we are still seeing the issue with the May PBI release Version: 2.105.664.0 64-bit (May 2022)

We are going through the motions with MS support but don't seem to be making any progress.

The issue doesn't happen if we use direct query - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/desktop-directquery-datasets-azure-analysis-s...

[uberdube]

Just gonna add to the list of frustrated users here to keep building the case to have this properly resolved - I am still experiencing this highly frustrating issue (and have been longer than I can recall now) despite all the talk of fixes & MS failure to reproduce the issue, that I've seen in the community threads. I must spend at least 1-2 hours of my day killing everything off with Task Manager and recovering & resaving my pbix files due to this highly frustrating freeing error. I agree it tens to happen after having left the reports sitting for an extended time (I sometimes leave stuff open overnight and the next morning it's broke) - but also I use parameterised dataflows & datasets, and find this happens frequently when switching between data sources in PBI Desktop.

If it's any help to anyone.. I've found on occasion that pressing the Esc key sometimes reverses this freezing, in particular when ou've tried to Save your work anticipating this freeze, and the Save prompt seems to get 'trapped' behind other windows (ie. you can't bring it into focus no matter what you try).. this is a total lottery though with no consistency I can find to it being successful. but it has actually worked on a handful of occasions.

Please address this Microsoft.. it's the most frustrating productivity killer ever. 😞

[Bill_NYC]

Happens here too.  I'm very surprised Microsoft hasn't fixed it!  What gives?

[Anonymous]

These are the correct repro steps (it only appears intermittent based on whether the cached dataset has been refresh, could be manually or on a schedule):

1. Power BI desktop connected Live to a dataset in the service

2. Refresh the dataset through powerbi.com

3. Click on the refresh button in Power BI desktop

4. Power BI desktop hangs

This is still an issue with the latest PBI desktop version.

[Anonymous]

I've had this problem for months, intermittently.  I uninstalled microsoft edge webview and lo and behold it went away.  This isn't surprising because whenever power bi would hang you could always see a webview process with way above normal activity.  I guess no matter what the users say this won't really ever be fixed, but I don't think I am the only one that months ago stated that the webview processes act weird when power bi freezes.  I am going to reinstall webview and see if the problems come back, seems likely.