Creating a ATL COM DLL in Vs2015 for a VB6 consumer is going badly because the "fault tolerant heap shim" is being applied to VB6, which I am running from the vs2015 debug command.
I have found many posts about disabling FTH in Windows 7, and indeed I have applied them all, including deleting the DLL in \Windows\AppPatch, as well as disabing FTH in the registry AND running the rundll script that is cited.
Still, this damn thing is making it impossible for me to debug the dll, because the FTH makes it run like a dog under VB6 in debug mode.
I even added "vb6.exe" and "full_path_to_vb6.exe" in the exclusions list in the registry -- to no avail.
I desperation, and needing to get some work done today, I have renamed vb6.exe to myvb7.exe (!) and this gets rid of the FTH alert in the VS debugger. But why can't I disable FTH for vb6.exe?
In fact, why does it even get enabled at all when a debugger is attached? It's driven me mad today.
Anyone?
There wasn't too much help forthcoming on this. For future reference, if the application (in this case VB6) is set to run in compatibility mode (either from a right click on the shortcut you use to launch it, or from a property set on the target exe itself) then nothing you do will release the shim!
Solution: don't run vb6 in compatibility mode under Windows 10!
Related
I am developing my QT application on windows 10 . The development is complete (as for now).
After run the application in debug mode from QT-creator, I am trying to run the executable from the build directory. But it shows me an "Application Error" dialog with the following message:
The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000a200). Click OK
to close the application.
What is the problem and How to fix it ?!
The error codes are given to you in the error message for a reason. They don't mean anything to regular users, but we're programmers and we are the intended audience. Now that Google has been invented, you have absolutely no excuse for not taking the 5 seconds to Google the error code and see what it means.
In this case, 0xc000a200 is an error code that corresponds to STATUS_NOT_APPCONTAINER. The master list of COM error codes is in the Windows SDK headers, specifically ntstatus.h. If one looks this one up, one sees the following description:
This operation is only valid in the context of an app container.
Now, admittedly, once you get to this point, you may discover that you are in well over your head. You may not have any idea what an app container is, and certainly no clue about how to fix it. But at least then you would be able to ask a good question, which will go a long way to getting you a good answer.
But let's see if you can get lucky this time anyway. This error is most commonly encountered when an application that is not inside of an app container tries to load a DLL that is marked as being part of an app container. It is the linker that is responsible for marking a DLL as being or not being part of an app container, controlled by a series of options for whatever linker you're using. On Microsoft's linker, it is /APPCONTAINER:YES and /APPCONTAINER:NO that control this. I'm not sure what toolchain Qt Creator uses, but if it is not Microsoft's, this should at least get you started looking in the right place in that linker's documentation. Make sure that all DLLs used by your application are not being marked as part of an app container.
The option should be off by default for a regular C++ desktop application project, but it's possible that one of the DLLs started out life as part of a Windows Store app. Or it's possible that the switch just got thrown accidentally.
I had the same error, but the approved solution wasn't the cure. What I found is that I had installed the wrong Qt compiler support packages. For me it was Qt 5.9.1 on Windows 10 64 bit to use with Visual Studio 2017. When installing Qt I selected the "msvc2017 64-bit" option. Sound good, right? Wrong: what I wanted was the "UWP x64 (MSVC2017)".
I write a c++ program using visual studio 2015 community in windows 7(64bit).
When I begin to run the program, sometimes the program will terminate, and a dialog box shows up, saying
"Application failed to initialize properly 0xc0000018".
Why do I get this error sometimes rather than always?
Thanks a lot.
Besides a bad application itself (that should be possible to track in the debugger):
This might be a corrupted Windows installation or Windows registry as well. Do you see it only for your application or also for some other applications?
It might be caused e.g. by some DLL that is built to be installed at fixed address, it might be a virus, malware, or even antivirus getting into the way.
Some of the reasons/solutions are mentioned e.g. here: https://superuser.com/questions/610495/the-application-was-unable-to-start-correctly-0xc0000018-windows-8-x64
The first thing to try is to remove the contents of APPINIT_DLLS in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Windows - some of the DLLs loaded there might cause the problem.
The reason you do not see it every time could be that sometimes there might be some other DLL loaded on the particular address before the DLL with the fixed address requirement is to be loaded, so the conflict only occurs then.
Environment: I have a .NET 4.0 solution that references some Visual C++ projects. Visual Studio 2010.
If I build my solution and run the resulting .exe right from the bin directory, I can reproduce my bug. But if I run it hitting the "play" button in Visual Studio (or if I run the process and attach to it) I can step through the code, and everything works as normal.
For reference, the problem I'm getting is an Access Violation which is most definitely happening the C++ code.
But more broadly, I'm wondering what other reasons there might be that attaching a debugger to a process "fixes" the issue.
MS VS is working like a sandbox. When you are starting app in that sandbox, your program inherits all settings from solution properties (or just VS settings). Make sure, all your options provided for the environment are correct. If that wont solve the problem, please double check those settings and think what can prevent access violation and uncheck/check it.
If you are using external DLL, those from you system and those from IDE may have different version. They, of course, may work in both cases, but also may cause problem like access violation or subcribent out of range, depending what is changed inside those dlls.
If its Windows app, try enabling/disabling LargeAddressAware.
If you are compiling stuff for another machine with different OS, it may happen very often due to changes in memory handling by native OS. Memory can sometimes be multi-blocked, extremely fragmented or even multi-deviced, so compile your program only with compilation especially made for targeted OS/machine
debug mode uses assert() and other stuff directly linked to debugging. If something is wrong in debugging and not in release, it means that it is acceptable by machine but not by debugging insertions. In that case you are screwed but if its not appear to be problem in other debugger, well... problem solved, its debugger issue, espeially if release without debugging options is working.
most tiring method - try to pinpoint access violation address and see inside memory windows to what are you referring.
in other cases, supply us with snippet, so we can tell something more!
#Matt this cant be heap problem, it can happen but its extremely rare.
#Huytard its wont happen, without linked dll's program should't even start.
The correct and short answer. Run Windows Updates.
The correct and long answer.
It turns out my build machine hasn't been updated in a while and was using an outdated version of Visual C++ compiler. There was a bug in the compiler for .NET 4 where static constructors were not getting called first before any other types of constructors (only in Release Mode).
But here's the kicker!
If you run the process in the Visual Studio debugger OR you attach to a remote process. The static constructors DO get called first like they are supposed to! (Hence making the issue completely un-reproducible in a debugging environment -- Even in Release mode) I found the issue by placing message boxes all over the place to determine the code path.
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/611716/c-cli-class-static-constructor-not-called-in-release-build
Running the green "play" button will use the IDE's environment
Executing from the directory will use the default environment
My guess is that there are probably some DLL's or dependencies that need to be added (directory paths) to your %PATH% environment variable.
Once you identify the dependencies and double check or something with dependency walker - you can set them in a batch script and then call your application.
For example:
#echo off
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\myLibs
call MyApp.exe
Gosh, this is so weird, I don't know what to say. The short version is that I have a simulator app which I spawn from my application when the user asks me to. It recently stopped working, though I can run the simulator fine from the command line or Start menu. This could be due to moving to VS2010 or Windows 7 or something I didn't notice reviewing source control diffs.
I have a second simulator which I try to spawn in the same fashion and it works fine.
By default, I'm using Qt3's QProcess wrapper around CreateProcess for this purpose, but I get the same behavior using system, my own CreateProcess, and ShellExecute.
ShellExecute of a cmd.exe "/c application params" does provide me with some more information however. I get the dialog
"The program can't start because MSVCR80.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem."
Inconveniently, both the parent application and the second simulator use MSVCR80.dll.
Upon copying MSVC*80.dll from g:\windows\winsxs\x86_microsoft.vc80.crt_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.4927_none_d08a205e442db5b5 to the same directory as my executable, the error message changes to
"Runtime Error!
Program: g:\path\to\app.exe
R6034
An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.
Followed by
The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142). Click OK to close the application.
And, once again, the application runs fine from the command line with those dlls in place.
Update:
I suspected perhaps it was environment related, so changed my ShellExecute mechanism to do cmd /c set && app params. I set up a cmd.exe with those same params and my app is now crashing similarly. Will update when I figure out why :)
It is MATLAB's component runtime tool that is modifying my process's PATH variable to bad effect. It is prepending its own dir full of dll's and wreaking havoc.
A foolish tool I was using did a setenv on PATH, prepending a directory it wanted for dynamically loading some dlls, but which messed up my application later. I ended up using GetEnvironmentStrings as shown in the last example here, erasing the first entry in the PATH env var, and sending the new (original) environment to QProcess, which wraps CreateProcessA.
You need to install the CRT
This may work - if it breaks, you get to keep both pieces :-)
Try installing VC++ redistributable from here - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=A5C84275-3B97-4AB7-A40D-3802B2AF5FC2&displaylang=en.
Remember to backup your system, create a restore point etc. before installing stuff.
Another idea -try reinstalling the failing appliacation itself. It may come with its own copy of VC++ redistributables, and reinstalling might help. Esp. trying to reinstall it using Windows 7's compability mode (perhaps go back to Vista or XP compatibility) might be even more effective.
To reiterate - you'll have to try, and I've no real idea if either of the above ideas will do you good, or even be sure to do no harm. That said, if I were faced with a similar problem, these are the steps I'd try. HTH!
I'm trying to generate a release build for a C++ application that I've written. The application runs fine (debug & release) when you run it from within VS2008; but when you run the executable it crashes nearly every single time.
Now, is there a hack so I can run this application as a standalone application without having to run through all of the code and finding the bug that is causing it?
Thanks in advance.
In short, no.
you will have to find the bug, if it works within VS, then I'd hazard a guess that it is a timing issue, possibly you're overwriting shared thread data, this would be less likely (though still possible to see) inside VS as its being run in a debug environment which slows it down a bit.
If you want help finding your bug, then tell us more. Otherwise, build your release with debug symbols (pdbs), install DrWatson as the system debugger and run it standalone. When it crashes DrWatson will create a minidump file, load this into WinDbg (my favourite) and you'll be able to see exactly where your bug is (it'll even tell you that the dump contains an exception and show you it by default. You need to add your source code path and path to your symbols in WinDbg to get it to do this correctly).
Then you will also know how to diagnose crashes when the app is run on-site too.
Are you loading external resources? If you are check that your relative paths are correct in the C++ program.
One possibility is that your program uses uninitialized heap data. Launching a program from the debugger enables the NT debug heap, which causes the heap allocator to fill new memory blocks with a fill pattern, and also enables some heap checking. Launching the same program from outside the debugger leaves the NT debug heap disabled, but if the program was linked against the debug version of the C runtime, then the CRT debug heap will still be enabled.
A much less likely possibility is that your program requires SeDebugPrivilege to be set in its process token. The debugger enables this privilege in its process token, which has the side effect that all programs launched from the debugger inherit this privilege. If your program tries to use OpenProcess()/ReadProcessMemory()/WriteProcessMemory() and doesn't handle errors correctly, it's conceivable that it could crash.
There are a few possibilities. Besides what has already been mentioned, running an app from Visual Studio will execute in the same security context as the Visual Studio instance. So if, for instance, you are working on Vista, you might be hitting an unhandled security violation if you're trying to access protected files, or the registry.
What if you build a debug version and run it standalone? Does it crash? If so, you can usually break into the debugger from there and get a call stack to see what the malfunction is.
From the details you've given, it sounds like there may be a library issue. Are you running the program on the same computer? If not then you'll also have to deploy the appropriate libraries for your application. If you are running on the same computer but outside of the dev environment, ensure that your application can see the appropriate libraries.
Best way i have found to debug in release is to create a crash dump when an crash happens and the dump then allows me to load debug symbols on my dev computer and find out whats going on. More info here: http://www.debuginfo.com/articles/effminidumps.html
You can also go to file => open in Visual Studio and open the .exe, so you are not starting it under the debugger per se. Not sure if it will help.
http://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2008/08/21/did-you-know-you-can-debug-an-executable-that-isn-t-a-part-of-a-visual-studio-project-without-using-tools-attach-to-process-296.aspx