I'm adding some functionality to an old admin tool written in VB6. The tool uses a c++ activeX object. I haven't worked on the tool since I upgraded to windows 7 and now the active X object fails to load with the 429 "ActiveX component can't create object" error. I'm not knowledgeable about VB6 but I have registered the activex dll and type library and I can remove and add the object from the project via the project->references window (the program fails to compile when the reference is removed as expected). The VB6 ide is running in administrator mode and I get the same error if I run the exe directly as an administrator.
Has anyone else experienced a similar problem and found a way to sort it out?
Thanks,
Patrick
PS : I have also tried putting the dll in question in the working directory of the exe
EDIT: I've had no luck trying to sort this out and ended up remoting into a windows 2003 server to test the changes.
You might try using Mark Russinovich's regMon and FileMon to see exactly what files or regkeys are being requested during the load of that dll. That can often tell you if you've got a missing dependency.
Also the DEPENDS.EXE that comes with VS6 is sometimes good for that (though it doesn't necessarily get ALL the dependencies of a dll or exe).
COM is going to use the registry to map from the class name to the physical DLL file that has to be loaded.
Check the registry keys pertaining to your COM object... first under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, then the class name, which gets you the CLSID, then the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID section for the GUID of the object, and then see where the physical library lives.
A 429 could mean all sorts of different things. Many times, it means that there's a dependency missing, and the easiest way to figure out what dependency is missing is to use procmon to see what files/registry settings the app is trying to access and hopefully, catch where you get ACCESS_DENIED or FILE_NOT_FOUND or what have you.
The problem might also be with your browser. A couple weeks ago I upgraded my IE, since then I've had to make changes by opening IE, click tools, click custom, scroll to the activeX controls and enable, and/or click prompt. The same was needed for scripting and for me to use XMLHttprequest. Now everything is back to working, however the ActiveX warning alert sometimes takes over 2 minutes to pop-up, then when clicked everything works fine.
Do you have UAC enabled on that machine? Have you tried disabling it? I have seen some cases where it let ActiveX controls being registered but didn't let applications using them ran.
Related
The app I work on is written mainly in VB6.
Some users report that when they start up my app a different MSI installer will automatically run and try to repair its own installation. Often this is for AutoCAD but sometimes other programs also.
Usually this occurs every time they start the app.
What is a procedure that we can use to diagnose why this occurs? Since it is a third-party's installer which is running we don't have any visibility into what it is doing.
AutoDesk does have some info published on this:
Unexpected installer launches
Windows Installer displayed unexpectedly
but these do not directly provide enough information. Ideally I want to be able to completely prevent this from occurring to my end users, rather than just telling them how to avoid it or clean it up.
Your installer is acting on a directory, file or registry key that Windows Installer knows is part of the AutoCad installation.
First, I would turn on global Windows Installer logging. This means that any Windows Installer activity - including AutoCad's installer - is written to an external log file (in %temp%).
How to Enable Windows Installer Logging
Next, run your installer, and let the AutoCad installer run.
Now go to %temp% and you should find files MSIXXXX.LOG - one for your installer, one for AutoCad. Open these and you can work your way through them and identify which file or registry key the AutoCad MSI find is missing or changed.
You may find WiLogUtl.exe helpful for this:
Wilogutl.exe
With any luck you will identify that the directory, file or registry key triggering autorepair is also in your installer. If you're really in luck you can identify it as an item you should not be installing anyway - perhaps you are referencing a system component that would be present anyway, something protected by Windows File Protection.
If not, you will have to look at something like RegFree COM to move files out of shared directories into your private directory and reduce registry conflicts. Also, if you are using (consuming) the Visual C++ Runtime MSMs to make your MSI, consider using the Microsoft EXE installer instead or (best of all) placing the DLLs directly in your program folder, since I've found that the MSMs can cause just this sort of problem.
With regards to Peter Cooper Jr's comment on VB6 causing self-repair. Please check out the heat.exe documentation for Wix. You will see that there is a special switch the tool supports to suppress extracting certain registry values that are owned by the VB6 runtime itself (and hence shouldn't be messed with or updated by any other MSI): http://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/overview/heat.html
Go down the list to the switch -svb6 and read the description to the right. (Reproduced here:)
When registering a COM component created in VB6 it adds registry
entries that are part of the VB6 runtime component:
CLSID{D5DE8D20-5BB8-11D1-A1E3-00A0C90F2731}
Typelib{EA544A21-C82D-11D1-A3E4-00A0C90AEA82}
Typelib{000204EF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
[as well as] Any Interfaces that reference these two type libraries
Does your installer write to these keys? If so try to exclude them - this is good to do even if it isn't the culprit in this particular case.
Other than that there is a lengthy description of what can cause Windows Installer self-repair here: How can I determine what causes repeated Windows Installer self-repair?. It is a long article because there are so many different ways self-repair can occur. The common denominator is that different installers on your system are fighting over a shared setting that they keep updating with their own values on each application launch in an endless loop.
I got a weird problem with my VB app that has got me very confused. I am updating an existing program. I had to add some processing queue capabilities. On my system, unit testing worked great but when I compile it and run it on a different computer (a network server machine) it first tries to open an office install. If I cancel this, the program seems to run fine. The problem is that this program will be run in the background and I can't be hitting cancel each time it runs.
So my question is this: what is going on here? I'm usually a java developer we eclipse so I'm used to being able to include all the needed libs into the jar files automatically. It doesn't seem like the case with VB6. it seems like it expects all the same libs to be on all the systems. Is there any way to tell what might be triggering this?
The only thing I can think of that is causing it is that I'm using the "OpenProcess" function in the kernal32 lib. that the only major change I have made.
any help would be very appricated. thanks!
EDIT:
It seems that multiple versions of word were installed on the system and it was screwing things up somehow. We uninstalled one and it fixed it.
I ran into this a while ago and it was related to my installer for the VB6 app overwriting some system files for Office that it shouldn't have. Any time one of the System dlls was accessed Windows would determine that something was wrong and the Office installer would start up.
The short-term fix was to let the Office Installer repair the broken chain of dlls.
The long-term fix was to never overwrite built-in Windows System dlls.
You could also check out the Microsoft Fix it Center.
I'm trying to deploy some Vb6 components on a Windows Server 2003 Standard x64 R2. I normally run these in a com+ application and I went through the normal routine of creating the COM+ application and adding all the components. Everything seemed to work fine until I actually tried to use any of the components. I would some kind of "ActiveX component can't create object" or "Application-defined or object-defined error" or something similar to that.
To remove as many variables a possible I created a very simple VB form to consume the simpliest of the components and tried that. Nope. So I created a simple install to install the component, and whooo hoooo it worked. So I tried one of the more envolved components with high hopes ... but no after the install I still can't call the component successfully. Using Dependency Walker I discovered that for some reason the msvbvm60.dll is not properly registerd.
I've downloaded VBRUN60.exe and VBRUN60SP6.exe and tried installing them. Even going so far as to do a run as with the administrator account and removing the check box for "Run this program with restricted access". I've tried to manually register the msvbvm60.dll in the SysWow64 directory.
Nothing seems to work. It just won't register. Does anybody have any suggestions? At this point I'll try just about anything.
Thanks
If you are registering the components manually you need to pay extra attention. As you are on a 64-bit OS there are two versions of regsvr32.exe. When registering VB6 components you must make sure to use the 32-bit version of regsvr32, which is located under the following location:
%WINDIR%\SysWOW64\regsvr32.exe
If you just type regsvr32 on the command prompt, normally the 64-bit version is chosen (because %WINDIR%\system32 is contained in the %PATH% environment variable), so please make sure to use the full path as above.
If you are using a 32-bit MSI to install your components, this version will be selected automatically and the registration should work just fine.
In case you haven't already done, you should give a try to Process Monitor - one of the best tools I have used on dll registering problems.
The following links will provide some usufull clues:
An excelent tutorial on using Process Monitor for problem solving;
ActiveX component can't create an object
RESOLVED! ActiveX Component Can't Create Object: Cube build failure against SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services
Hope it helps :D
I've had trouble with unregistered components for Visual Basic 6 - although not tried to use the same one as you are mentioning. Manually registering never resolved things, no matter which reg server was used
The problem (eventually) turns out to be Internet Explorer 10. Uninstalling that (due to the way Windows 7 handles IE as Windows updates, this meant unistalling newer versions first to expose the older ones) worked. Afterwards, reinstalling the latest IE brings no problem.
I'm working on an application developed for Windows XP SP3, using VB6. I'm currently in the process of getting it to work on Windows 7, but am encountering a problem with one of our custom OCX files.
When attempting to load a form that contains an instance of the control contained in the problem OCX, the following error is produced:
Failed to load control 'x' from y.ocx. Your version of y.ocx may be outdated. Make sure you are using the version of the control that was provided with your application.
I've checked the version numbers and they're all correct and referencing the proper version. The OCX registers fine, and all the expected registry entries are present.
Inspection with DependencyWalker shows no missing dependencies.
The software works fine under XP, and this is (seemingly) the only issue when running on Windows 7.
Interestingly, if I run through the VB6 IDE using a VB6 group (with the offending OCX part of the group, and the application the startup project), I don't have the issue. Running the application on it's own through the IDE still presents the error.
Any ideas on what could be missing which would cause the application to throw this error?
Error occurs on both Windows 7 Professional and Home Professional, both 32 bit.
This is almost certainly an interface compatibility problem. COM interfaces are versioned entirely separately from your Major/Minor/Revision numbers, which are little more than comments except as used by Installer.
Somewhere along the line you broke binary compatibility, and you are trying to deploy a library with a newer interface than your application was compiled against.
These version numbers are found in keys such as:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{class Id GUID}\VERSION
Your program needs to have its old reference to the OCX removed, a new one set, and then it must be recompiled. This also means deleting any instances of the control and adding them back one by one.
I doubt this is a Windows 7 issue.
I would suspect this is a UAC problem. Try turning UAC off to see if that solves the immediate issue. If it does then you have to regsiter everything using 'run as administrator' and/or create a manifest for you application.
Sounds like on of the controls included in your OCX is having issues loading, not a general registration error. Look at the constructors for x control, and see if they are doing anything that disagrees with UAC or such. One way you can debug this is put some kind of a break before the control is initialized, and debug the application from Visual Studio (remember to create the PDB's in VB6), and then carry on from the break to see why the control isn't initializing.
I have a VB6 app that formerly worked perfectly on a Vista machine as a scheduled task, but it will no longer open on the same machine. The app generates export files in a specified folder with no direct output on the screen. I get no errors, no missing references, just absolutely nothing.
The machine is running Vista Business 32-bit, UAC is disabled with a single administrator account, and automatic updates are turned off. The app resides in a non-protected folder, and the export files are put in a folder on the desktop. The client swears that the only change they made to that computer since I installed this app was installing Norton Antivirus, which has never caused problems before with our software.
In addition to the normal VB6 references, the app references Microsoft Scripting Runtime (scrrun.dll), and Microsoft DAO 3.6 (dao360.dll). Both of these files are present and registered on the target machine, along with all the other VB6 dependencies. I added MsgBox statements at the beginning of Sub Main() just to see if anything is being executed, and its not. Disabling Norton yielded no results, nor did reinstalling VB6 runtime to rule out any corrupted libraries. Not once did I get any messages, error or otherwise from my app.
I've never had an issue like this before and I'm completely stumped. Is there anything else that could be causing this?
Edit - The app does not run even when I run it manually, so the part about it being a scheduled task is irrelevant to my problem, sorry for including it.
The user has full administrator credentials, no compatibility mode was needed on the initial test which at the time, was done on this very machine I am having the problem on. For grins I tried compatibility mode for XP and 2000, still nothing.
Try to inspect - if you can access them - the Event Viewer messages. Maybe you will find some tell-tell signs in there...
You could try running the program in Windbg, a free standalone debugger from Microsoft. Compile your VB6 EXE into native code with symbols (create PDB files) and you will be able to debug your application in Windbg.
I would guess one of two things will happen.
Windbg will fail to load the EXE. Presumably with an error message that will identify your problem.
Windbg will load the EXE, and you can single-step through to see what happens.
Here's a 2006 blog post by a Microsoft guy about using Windbg with VB6, and 2004 blog post by another Microsoft VB guy with a brief introduction to Windbg.
Has the user changed their password? That will cause the scheduled task to fail until they re-enter the password on the task.
Have you tried running the process directly, instead of as a scheduled task? I'm far from an expert, but it may be that any errors being generated are not showing up because the program is running as a task.