Quite evidently, I have a GPK file that is corrupted. Last night, as I was investigating why only one of my alignments would break Active Chain Control, the tool that draws profiles, the tool that creates the profile cell, etc. I'm using Power Geopak SS4 .872.
In the process of my investigation last night, the entire GPK file seems to be corrupted so that even selecting that GPK file in Active Chain Control, etc., breaks the tool. Oddly enough, COGO does not break when I open that GPK file. In the list of chains and profiles, I see no obvious corruption, and I can describe the chain (ML20E) that started the whole corruption scandal. Nothing seems out of place. I can import all my alignments and such from that corrupted file into a new file, and everything works fine.
Is there anything I should look for in the future about corruption in GPK files?
I'll upload the corrupted and imported GPK files securely for consideration. The corrupt one will be job009.gpk; the good one will be job999.gpk.
Edit: I take it back. Both of those files are apparently corrupt. But I have another file that has ML20E that isn't corrupt. It'll be job998.gpk.
Edit: Apparently the corruption is in another alignment. To solve it, I need to delete alignments in bunches. Meanwhile, it takes like 20 seconds each iteration. And I'm not even sure anything is working correctly because when I open the tool to place a profile cell it crashes without even the chance to select the GPK file.
Edit: It is definitely ML20E. This is obvious when you create a new COGO file, import all from the corrupted one, you'll see the crash when opening a relevant tool. If you then delete ML20E it isn't an issue. Is it because the definition of ML20E is longer than 255 characters long? Truncating the definition so that it is just one line of only 250 characters, COGO crashes.
Apparently the solution is to make the definition across multiple lines (using the hyphen). From what I can tell, the entire statement must be 255 or fewer characters (excluding hyphens; including hyphens makes it 258 characters). Something to look into later is whether the definition can be up to 255 characters while the rest of the defining statement (including "store chain ____" and "sta ____") might be longer.
In case it's not obvious, this is a problem that may be buried in some documentation somewhere, but it's a problem nonetheless. And what's worse about it is that it's only apparent when you decide to start creating the profile cell or using Active Chain Control (which is something that OpenRoads people might not use very much).
Edit: So a workaround solution for my case is to simply truncate the alignment.
However, in an effort to solve the deeper problem, my next step in troubleshooting this issue was to rename each curve element to reduce the overall length of the definition. It still causes issues, so my next guess is that it is an issue of processing some curves within the alignment.
At this point, I'm all out of ideas and all out of steam.