A post, just for search engines to find:

After upgrading to some flavor of BreezeBrowser 3.7, the program (which had been rock solid in the past) started to crash during certain operations involving EXIF data. Specifically, if I tried to copy EXIF data around from images taken with multiple Canon cameras (the 1Ds, D60, and S50), BB would sometimes crash or freeze with 99% CPU usage and ever-increasing memory usage. When restarting BB after a crash/freeze, merely clicking on a culprit image would result in an immediate crash. Restarting BB again and doing any other operation not involving the culprit image would somehow “fix” the problem temporarily — until another crash.

Chris Breeze, BreezeBrowser’s author, had never heard of any such stability problems. Finally, in desperation, I deleted BB’s registry entries and re-registered my install (I was now using version 3.8, with the same problems happening). The problem went away. Chris thought that it might be a problem with certain color profiles, but it’s impossible to know. I’m just happy that it’s stable again. Over the years, I’ve been really impressed with Chris’ responsiveness in bug reports and feature requests. BreezeBrowser is definitely worth every penny it costs to register. [check it out]

UPDATE Jan 9, 2004: It turns out that ACDSee’s rotate routines were corrupting Canon MakerNotes, which crashed BB. Chris has since added a sanity check to BB so the program won’t crash if it finds corruption. Here’s the message he sent me:

“What appears to have happened is all the portrait orientation shots have corrupted Canon MakerNotes and this is causing BreezeBrowser to crash. … I’ve added a “sanity check” in BB which should prevent the problem. … It appears that something is taking a JPEG with Motorola aligned Exif and is trying to rewrite it as Intel aligned Exif but is leaving the MakerNote Motorola aligned.”