Symptom

 When trying to print a label with serialization on it, BarTender may freeze. Print Portal will make this immediately apparent, but the freeze may be present in Designer and Print Station as well.

Fix/Answer

Find the serialized object with a named data source. Note the data source name on the "data source" tab:

On the Transforms tab, open up the serialization dialog box. The Serial Numbers option at the bottom is likely set to a data source of some type.

Open up the properties dialog to check on the name of the data source

The named data source linked is the object itself noted earlier or is another object which is serializing. This can also happen when another value that may also be incrementing.

To stop this behavior, remove the link to the data source. Change it to another value or set it to read the value from the print dialog.

What's happening here?

When BarTender looks at the values at print time, it's going into a recursive loop. For this example, when it tries to read the Serialization variable, it sees that it's set to 1234. That means it's trying to create 1234 serial numbers.

But when it tries to increment to 1235, guess what? It now needs to create 1235 serial numbers on top of the 1234 it's trying to create before. This process spirals out of control quickly until the program either freezes or crashes. It's recursively attempting to read its own value and react according to what value it's given. As the value repeatedly increments (or decrements), the program gets confused and is unable to continue.

Breaking the link of a value trying to read itself during print time will stop this behavior from even starting.