Dear Amanda,

I'm sorry you are experiencing this problem, sounds very frustrating. The behaviour you describe typically happens when an error crashes the EPPI-Reviewer client, if and only if it is an error we have not identified as something that might happen: in case of known possible problems, we normally would write some ad-hoc error handling routine to report the error and at least allow people to continue working. Thus, we already have a strong indication that your problem is new to us and might require some in-depth analysis.

The setup details you report are fully supported, in fact I've just tried to replicate the issue (using Firefox 40.0.3) with your reports and all your included items, everything worked for me without trouble at all. This test was the first thing to try, because it is theoretically possible that the contents of your reports include something we didn't anticipate and would crash the report viewer, but this isn't the case.

Having checked for the obvious, we need to figure out exactly how the crash occurs, and I will need a little help from you, as I can't follow the details you describe.

First of all, could you try the following?

• In the main Documents window (showing the included items), select the first 4 documents only.
• without changing tab, from the main toolbar therein, click the "Run Reports" button (on the right of the "printer" icon).
• A window showing the report options should show up. This window has three drop-down menus in the upper half called "report" (used to pick the configurable report you wish to run), "Items to include" (please leave it to "all selected items") and "Order by".
• the first report available should be "Characteristics of Included Studies" please make sure this report is selected and click "Go".

A bigger report window should appear, showing you the report contents. If this does happen, please repeat the procedure, but this time select all your included items. Does it still work?

If it does, could you let us know more about how you can trigger the crash? I couldn't really follow your description above because it seems that you are trying to run a report, not design/edit the settings of a given configurable report: the "report type" drop-down menu is present in the latter dialog (within the "Reports" tab) but not the window you get when trying to run a report.

I hope this helps, please do let us know how things are proceeding for you.

Sergio