Portable Electrum only appears on task manager on Windows 7

[I_am_wealth]

Hello, does anybody have the same problem? I run Electrum and it either takes ages to become visible (more than an hour) or never. Everytime I run portable Electrum, a new instance of electrum-3.0.6-portable.exe appears on task manager, but I never see any of its windows. Here's a screenshot:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yp23t6vj6w8ds7k/electrum_bug_task_manager.jpg?dl=0

And I have to logoff to kill the processes because I can't kill them with Task Manager!

[BitMaxz]

Where did you download the portable electrum wallet?
There are lots of fake electrum wallet these days just to scam and steal bitcoins.. Be careful of fake electrum wallet always make sure that you are using the official website of electrum wallet.. Here is their official website where you can download the latest version of electrum wallet check it here https://electrum.org/#download

Also make sure to use updated Anti virus to keep your computer clean.. If you downloaded the electrum wallet from their official website maybe your OS is corrupted because we have the same OS windows 7. You can also try the windows installer  of electrum wallet instead.

[I_am_wealth]

I did download the wallet from Electrum's website. I don't think my PC has a virus.

I'm running a DOS backup with Robocopy, I'll stop it just in case it may interfere with Electrum (I don't think it does anyway) and tell you about it.

[I_am_wealth]

Oh well it was the robocopy backup...   I stopped it (closed the DOS window with it) and Electrum is working. Seems robocopy was using too much memory or was conflicting somehow with Electrum. Good to know! Don't make any heavy backup processes while using your wallet.

[HCP]

Most likely an issue with either Memory... Or I/O... Portable needs to access the disk to setup folders and files if they're not already there... If you're doing I/O heavy tasks like robocopy (which will attempt to utilise all available I/O bandwidth and disk cache etc) there won't be many resources left for other processes.

[bob123]

Everytime I run portable Electrum..

You might consider changing to the non-portable version of electrum.
While the portable version itself is not directly less secure, its still a higher risk using it compared to the standard version.
The portable version does nothing further to keep the private keys secured. Using it on an infected pc will mostly result in a loss of coins.

You can read the post from ThomasV to get more insight: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=154451.0

[HCP]

While the portable version itself is not directly less secure, its still a higher risk using it compared to the standard version.
The portable version does nothing further to keep the private keys secured. Using it on an infected pc will mostly result in a loss of coins.

It really isn't a higher risk compared with standard version... Using the standard version on an infected PC will be just as bad as using the portable version.

As Thomas' post highlights, the risk is not from the app itself, it simply comes from the way it can be used... ie. if you're actually using it in a "portable" manner... that is to say, you're running it from a USB stick on multiple/"foreign" computers... which is not really a great idea.

However, I would suggest that an argument could be made that using the portable version on your own computer (and NEVER using it externally) is possibly MORE secure than using the installer or standard version:

- Portable version doesn't leave as many visible traces of an Electrum install on your PC... No menu items etc, anyone using your computer would need to know where to look.
- Wallet data is NOT stored in the "default" location of %AppData%\Electrum\Wallets etc... remember the "Electron Cash copying wallet files" scandal? Wouldn't have happened if you used a portable version, also any malware aimed at copying wallet files may not find wallet files etc

[nc50lc]

Why do we even need a portable version?
A stand-alone version is available that can be used for removable disks.

Simply make a copy of the wallet file in the same folder where the stand-alone executable was located in the flash drive.

Anyone already tried this?

[HCP]

Why do we even need a portable version?
A stand-alone version is available that can be used for removable disks.

The standalone version, even though it does not "install" itself and create icons etc... still uses %AppData%\Electrum as it's primary data directory... so if you run it from a USB it will create the directories in %AppData% if they don't exist, leaving a trail behind on the system drive.

Basically, the 3 different versions work as follows:

Installer = Menu icons,uninstaller etc, "Program Files" application directory, "%AppData%\Electrum" data directory
Standalone = run from .exe location, "%AppData%\Electrum" data directory
Portable = run from .exe location, ".exe location\electrum_data" data directory