Finale not accepting input, but not frozen

[dallascomposer]

So I Closed a file, expecting to get the "Do you want to save the changes made to the document "Untitled"?" popup. And I did.

But now I can go no farther. I have three buttons "Save", "Don't Save", and "Cancel". They change their highlight when I click on them but then nothing happens. The popup stays there. The ESC key highlights the Cancel button, but nothing happens.

I can still mostly interact with the program, except for the Undo, Copy, Paste, Close, Save, and Save As commands. I can still edit/add notes and use the menus to do all other Finale functions. The popup window just stays right in the middle.

Is there some secret way to bypass this or is this file lost? I can think of nothing left to do but Force Quit.

[Bill Stevens]

Are you able to export XML?

That might save the file.

::: Bill

[dallascomposer]

That is perfect! Yes, I was able to do that, and I was able to save as an old Finale version as well. Fortunately, my AutoSave was turned on, so the document was recovered as well. I hate these Finale panic attacks.

[motet]

This may be the temp file bug, in which Finale stores temp files in the system temp directory but neglects to lock them. The OS comes along and cleans up, deleting the files, and Finale can't recover. The solution is to make your own temp file just for Finale. You'll have to clean it out manually once in a while, since Finale doesn't always clean up after itself when it exits (I guess relying on the OS rather than taking the trouble to keep track).

The sad thing, there is a decades-old simple way to handle temporary files on UNIX (the parent of the MacOS), in fact intended by the designers: leave the files open while Finale is running (so the OS won't delete them) but unlink them (UNIX jargon) immediately after creating and opening. When the files are finally closed, either explicitly or by Finale exiting without explicitly deleting them, the OS will see they're both not open and not linked anywhere and immediately delete them. This prevents both the deleted-too-soon problem and the not-cleaned-up problem.