Help with student issue: GR.jl and "gks not in proper state" on Windows 10

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I have student getting “gks not in proper state” when trying to plot under Windows 10 using 1.9-beta-3 and a fresh Julia install with only the latest Plots.jl, IJulia, and GR explicitly added. Does anyone have suggestions for how to fix this? It appears to be a GR issue, as I couldn’t make a plot directly with GR (GR loads fine, but the error appears when calling plot(1:100, 1:100)), but could add PlotlyJS as a Plots.jl backend and make a plot just fine.

Looking online it seems this issue has cropped up from time to time in GR.jl, and was last handled via a fix for Windows 11 in October, but I did confirm the student is on the latest release.

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Is the student blocking any network sockets? GR communicates with the QT window via socket.

Could we try to simplify first and just try this directly from the Julia REPL (not IJulia)?

julia> using GR

julia> plot(1:100, 1:100)

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Sorry I wasn’t clear. I was working via the REPL, and I tried just loading GR and plotting as you suggest (that is how I concluded it is a GR problem and not a Plots.jl problem).

I don’t use or have Windows, so my knowledge of how one does things there is limited; is there an easy way to determine if the student is blocking the socket?