I messed up my install of Juice podcatcher

Long explanation (If you want the skinny, just look at the summary below)

Update, 2/1: the fix was not completely successful. See the update at the end.

This isn't really a software engineering topic. But, hey! It's my blog. Someone might really need this information!

So I wanted to try the Juice open source podcast receiver (some people call them podcatchers). As of my writing this article, the current version is 2.2. I installed it, started it, opened up the preferences and saved them with a wrong path to the directory where my podcasts should be saved. I think the problem is that by default the path was wrong for Vista. It was "C:\Users\\My Documents\My Received Podcasts"

But it should have been "C:\Users\\Documents\My Received Podcasts".

After I saved the preferences with the invalid path, Juice would crash every time I tried to start it. The following is from the log and shows the error that was crashing Juice.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "gui.py", line 4, in ?
File "iPodderGui.pyc", line 3573, in main
File "ipodder\configuration.pyc", line 468, in __init__
File "os.pyc", line 154, in makedirs
OSError: [Errno 17] File exists: 'C:\\Users\\Ari Zelanko\\My Documents\\My Received Podcasts'

I tried to find a solution by googling the error. It didn't yield anything. Several people had posted questions on many sites about similar problems. No solutions were published.

I tried to reinstall the application. I uninstalled and reinstalled. No improvement. Juice still crashed on startup. I opened up the readme file in the Juice install directory. It has a section about updated from an older version of Juice (formerly iPodder). This is a quote from the Juice 2.2 readme file:

In iPodder 1.0 the settings were stored in the iPodder installation directory, probably C:\Program Files\iPodder. Starting with version 1.1 the configuration are placed outside the installation directory, in a user-specific directory, if possible. The default location is the NT-style Application directory, usually C:\Documents and Settings\yourname\Application Data\iPodder. If your settings were lost, try locating these three files in the previous installation directory and copying them to the new configuration directory: favorites.txt, history.txt, schedule.txt.

So, I started to look around my user directory for the settings. I found them. On Vista the path to the configuration was "C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\iPodder".

"I'll just remove the settings folder and Juice will start up normally, right?" I thought. So I deleted the iPodder directory under my user profile. I started up Juice and voila! There was no change. Juice still crashed with the same message! How infuriating! (I should stop the gratuitous use of exclamation points!)

Just when I was about to give up, I thought, "Maybe if I reinstall right now, the problem will go away." ... And that worked.

Summary

The problem:
Because I set an invalid path-to-save-my-podcasts-to in the Juice preferences, the application wouldn't start. Rather it would crash on startup.

The error log:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "gui.py", line 4, in ?
File "iPodderGui.pyc", line 3573, in main
File "ipodder\configuration.pyc", line 468, in __init__
File "os.pyc", line 154, in makedirs
OSError: [Errno 17] File exists: 'C:\\Users\\Ari Zelanko\\My Documents\\My Received Podcasts'

The Solution:
I removed the iPodder config directory under my user profile ("C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\iPodder"). I then ran the Juice 2.2 installer again. I started the app and this time set the right directory for saving podcasts!

Update: The fix wasn't successful (2/1/2009)
After a restart, the problem in this post returned. For now I've carefully reproduced the issue, entered a bug with the project and included logs, config files and such. I've uninstalled Juice for now. I think I will look for another free podcatcher program.