Thx Kovid. I don't know what sort of proxy they use here, I just know calibre can't cope with it
. So nothing will work, be it the callback to the calibre mothership at startup, checks for updates, metadata downloads, plugin installs etc. When I looked at the calibre command line in the Help it seems there was an argument to prevent calibre looking for updates but only for the calibre.exe, not calibre-debug.exe. Not dumping the whole stack trace would certainly be a nice improvement thanks - after all it is an "expected" exception in this scenario so really could just have a user friendly debug message.
Thx also for that second revision stuff link btw - shall give that a whirl!