Exception thrown while trying to get active window - WINDOWS

• [ x ] I am on the latest ActivityWatch version.
• [ x ] I have searched the issues of this repo and believe that this is not a duplicate.

• OS name and version: Windows 10 Pro 21H2
• ActivityWatch version: 0.12.1
• • There is one that is similar, but it is for MacOS, and I checked through multiple bug reports and didn’t seem to find something that applies. The fix seems to be use the latest binary (of course, I tried that).

Describe the bug

The AW window watcher seems to be throwing exceptions all the time. This is from the top of the log, but the main exception, below in the log, is replicated hundreds of times.

To Reproduce

Removed installed Activity watch components in both AppData/Local and AppData/Local/Programs. Reinstalled with both ADMIN and regular user authority. Checked the box to start AW. AW seems to start, but no window titles are reported, graphs don’t display, etc. Checked logs for AW window watcher and can see the below logs

Expected behavior

The expected behavior is to see window titles both in the log and in the program.

Documentation

2022-10-10 14:40:43 [INFO ]: aw-watcher-window started (aw_watcher_window.main:62) 2022-10-10 14:40:45 [INFO ]: Connection to aw-server established by aw-watcher-window (aw_client.client:429) 2022-10-10 14:40:45 [ERROR]: Exception thrown while trying to get active window (aw_watcher_window.main:110) Traceback (most recent call last): File “aw_watcher_window\main.py”, line 107, in heartbeat_loop File “aw_watcher_window\lib.py”, line 57, in get_current_window File “aw_watcher_window\lib.py”, line 40, in get_current_window_windows File “aw_watcher_window\windows.py”, line 26, in get_app_name File “wmi.py”, line 1072, in query File “wmi.py”, line 1072, in <listcomp> File “win32com\client\dynamic.py”, line 324, in getitem File “win32com\client\util.py”, line 41, in getitem File “win32com\client\util.py”, line 62, in __GetIndex pywintypes.com_error: (-2147217392, ‘OLE error 0x80041010’, None, None)

Additional context

This is one of my favorite programs. So thank you so much for any help. I’ve used this program for a long time. All of sudden without any changes in my software setup, the Window Watcher seemed to be showing UNKNOWN for everything. I couldn’t figure out a way to fix that. Now however, nothing seems to be working to get the window titles back.

[jparrish88]

Hi All, @ErikBjare suggestion worked. I followed the instructions here after seeing that the WMI services were invalid. I apologize for wasting everyone’s time. The steps I took to resolve this are very similar to the article, but basically I executed:

1. Open Admin CMD Prompt (Not powershell), that will drop you into Windows\System32\
2. cd wbem
3. dir /b *.mof *.mfl | findstr /v /i uninstall > moflist.txt & for /F %s in (moflist.txt) do mofcomp %s
4. Open WMIMGMT.MSC
5. Ensure the system connects to WMI management

Thanks to everyone who helped me: @ShootingKing-AM @mminer237 @ErikBjare

[ErikBjare]

Yay! Happy we could get to the bottom of this 😃