MySQL: Root Element Is Missing (Windows 8.1)

July 28, 2014 —John Koster

The other day when I restarted my development machine I got a nice little surprise from MySQL Notifier. A charming error message appeared on the screen that said "High Severity Error: Root element is missing". Dismissing this error, another one took its place stating "Log file path must be defined before calling the WriteToLog method". At first I just ignored it, because I had a lot of work to do. But today when I went to launch an application I am building, it took over 10 seconds to load! Unacceptable!

MySQL: Root Element Is Missing (Windows 8.1) | Root element is missing.

MySQL: Root Element Is Missing (Windows 8.1) | Log file path must be defined before calling...

#The Problem

I'm honestly not sure what caused this issue. I got this issue again today after my machine (Windows 8.1) crashed with the helpful MEMORY_MANAGEMENT error message. Google Chrome's preferences also could not be reloaded after this crash. I will be running the memory diagnostics tool to see if I can resolve this issue completely on my machine.

#The Solution

The solution that worked for me was to find the connections.xml and settings.config file in the %appdata%\Oracle\MySQL Notifier folder and delete them. I did inspect both files before I deleted them, honestly the settings.config file looked fine. The connections.xml file was most definitely corrupted though.

#Conclusion

After deleting the files, I re-launched MySQL Notifier and the error message didn't appear. So that is good. I am still unsure of what caused this error in the first place. Fixing this issue also resolved the issue with the application taking over 10 seconds to load. Quite a jump when the app usually responds with times around 150-190ms.

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