@burnout426

Hi, out of general interest I spent a couple of hours poking around this issue and can say that:

• It appears to be not reproducible with the Opera's stable version 66.0.3515.44

• Annoyingly, it's not 100% reproducible with the Opera's Beta version 67.0.3575.8. But it sort of becomes close to 100% reproducible at times -> I can even quit Opera, restart it, and visit the web page and the issue persists.

Is Opera's adblocker and or VPN turned on? If so, try with those off.
I've tried with those options on/off and haven't noticed any impact one way or another.

Is Opera's battery saver turned on and you're running on battery? If so, try turning the battery saver off.
I'm not running on battery (I never am).

.. disable hardware acceleration and restart Opera to see if it helps
I've tried with hardware acceleration on/off and haven't noticed any impact one way or another.

I'll attach a few screenshots of the 'issue in action', maybe some knowledgeable guy might even be able to figure out something ..

#1 the initial status

#2 the offending page opened

#3 the offending page resized to minimum -> interestingly memory allocation gets reduced (to normal or thereabouts)

Well, that's all, perhaps it might be worth for a developer having a look at it since it's a 'feature' that has appeared post version 66.0.3515.44.

@burnout426 Aha, okay. Thanks and have a nice weekend, cheers!

@xyzzy-opera Geez, I forgot the system information .. here it is:

inxi -Fxz yields:

System:
Host: minttu Kernel: 4.15.0-206-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc
v: 7.5.0 Desktop: Cinnamon 4.0.10 Distro: Linux Mint 19.1 Tessa
base: Ubuntu 18.04 bionic

opera-stable_97.0.4719.83_amd64.deb won't install on Linux Mint due to libgcc dependency error.

Is this a known 'feature'?

Anyways, all suggestions are welcome.

It appears that this has now been fixed in version 89.0.4447.48

Sweet.

@bazzaman said in Starting Opera causes excessive MsiInstaller logging to EventLog:

@xyzzy-opera

You may be right, but this is happening every time Opera is launched. One has to wonder why why would Opera need to check for installed software on every launch?

A good question.

FWIW, the culprit is not opera_autoupdate.exe. I replaced it with a dummy executable and the behaviour remained the same.

@bazzaman
Hi there,

Thank you very much for the information!

I'd imagine that they'll weed this one out - all in all, it's a quite nasty feature, after all.

@xyzzy-opera
Additional information

To be more precise, I suspect that Opera's opera_autoupdate.exe ends up running a WMI query which causes the behaviour described above.

A quote from the article I linked to above:

Don’t use Win32_Product

The Win32_Product WMI class is part of the CIMV2 namespace and implements the MSI provider (msiprov.dll and associated msi.mof) to list and validate installed installation packages. You will see MsiInstaller event 1035 in the Application log for each application queried by the class:*

I noticed that whenever I start Opera, it causes the Windows Management Instrumentation to enumerate all software installed via MSI. This in turn produces one Event Log (Application) entry per installed piece of software.
On my computer this is ~500 log entries - which is unacceptable.
This appears to have started about a week ago.

I'm almost certain that this has something to do with the Win32_Product WMI object, some information is available at:
How to NOT Use Win32_Product in Group Policy Filtering

Opera Version:

• 89.0.4447.38

Windows 10 Home version:

• Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19043.1645]

Sample Event Log screenshot:

Good day,

I just noticed that at least opera_crashreporter.exe apparently utilizes the OutputDebugString Windows API.

That can be rather annoying (should one be in the midst of debugging some program), so, are there any 'hidden' settings which would save the day?

PS. output from H:\Util\Opera\80.0.4170.63\opera_crashreporter.exe:

ERROR:directory_reader_win.cc(43)] FindFirstFile: The system cannot find the path specified. (0x3)

@burnout426 Aha, okay. Thanks and have a nice weekend, cheers!

@burnout426 Good. I'd assume that this issue gets kind of automagically morphed into, say, a bug report by folks reading this forum?