Ack! Windows Live Writer crashes every time I try to hyperlink something.

In case you really couldn’t tell, I use Windows Live Writer for all of my blog posts. It’s free, it runs respectably well (usually) on my little netbook, and it gets the job done in a nice WYSIWYG fashion. Combine all of that and you get an app that in my book is full of win. At least, it is until it crashes on me repeatedly every time I try to create a hyperlink by selecting text I have already typed, and then try to use either the option on the right side toolbar, or by selecting the option under Insert on the menu. Then it is full of something else which I will not spell out here, as I try to keep this blog PG-13 at its worst.

If you are experiencing the same problem, then this little gem of a popup should look very familiar to you.

However, WLW hasn’t really stopped working. You can let that sit until it times out trying to find a solution and asks you to close the program, or you can click Cancel; either way you are right back in WLW where you left off…no program restart, nothing lost, or anything else that you’d expect from a program crash. WTH?

If you check the WLW log (Help, About Windows Live Writer, Show Log File, then open the Windows Live Writer.log file in your favourite text editor,) you’ll see that the problem is caused by

System.TypeInitializationException: The type initializer for ‘WindowsLive.Writer.HtmlEditor.Linking.GlossaryManager’ threw an exception. —> System.ArgumentException: Missing text parameter

While I cannot explain why this happened, I can tell you how to fix it. Open the %appdata%\Windows Live Writer\LinkGlossary\linkglossary.xml file and find the section that has nothing between <text> and </text> tags. Either add some text, or delete that entire section. Save the file and you should be right as rain. If you are not greatly attached to any links you wanted to automatically link to you can just delete this file. WLW will recreate it the next time you create a link. Hope this helps someone else out.

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