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.
Related
I have a Clickonce app from Visual Studio 2015 SP3 that is published to the network server and used in-house only. The program works just fine when launched from Visual Studio. It runs just fine on a Windows machine that does not have the 1803 update. But once a machine updates to 1803, the application no longer starts. I get the "Checking for updates..." window then nothing. On a fresh install, I usually get the Smartscreen telling me the program may be dangerous. It doesn't get that far.
I've created the Clickonce from a computer with the 1803 update and the problem still exists.
I've disconnected the machine from the network. The application starts but then has no database access and it needs the database. It's also written to hide buttons that would use the database to prevent users from trying to do things that require it.
I found a workaround (third paragraph) at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/7cbd16f5-526e-4b0b-a186-3ebf41b7b349/smartscreen-prompt-does-not-show-for-clickonce-app-since-windows-10-update-1803?forum=win10itprogeneral. When I start the application from the directory mentioned, I get the Smartscreen and can tell it to run anyway. Every time I click the desktop icon, it works just fine.
If a new release is published, the new release is downloaded and the program updated, but the Smartscreen no longer appears and the application never starts.
So somewhere between installing the latest update and the Smartscreen, this is failing. Anyone else experiencing this and have an idea as to why?
Yes, frustratingly I also experienced this today. Presumably a security update that they'll release another patch for given this is quite a pain for developers and users of small business apps.
Rather than disable Defender or SmartScreen I chose to add my deployment website to the Trusted Sites in Internet Explorer and that then re-instated the warning dialog and my app updated and ran as before.
Really annoying given the nature of the issue and how long it took to figure out, but at the same time I had to use IE today, which is a rare event nowadays.
This works for me...Warn doesnt warn anymore...
After running in the same problem, I just found that my application was going to halt after a stupid uncaught exception.
Despite the fact that the image below is in Portuguese, Event Viewer shows the right error cause.
In my case, was a corrupted settings file!
It appears as though some subsequent Windows Updates have fixed the issue on several of our PC's that were previously experiencing the issue.
Check for the updates listed here.
https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=KB4338548
Running winver.exe will show you which build you have.
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 made a minor change to a legacy Visual C++ / MFC app built with VS 2008. I changed some UI resources in the .rc file and compiled without any problems, then deployed it on my client's system. However, the program which was previously doing fine now fails to run on exactly one of their servers. It works fine on my laptop and on their other servers, many of whom are basically identical to the one having the trouble.
The weird thing however is that there is absolutely no error message whatsoever. No message box, no errorlevel set (when run on command prompt), no Dr. Watson entry, no nothing.
It's an MFC app that does not really comprise anything very special. It does link in some external libraries – e.g., some old version of the Xerces C++ XML parser. But this is probably not too relevant, right?
The program has a class derived from CWinApp, and I tried to add some logging in its constructor. Based on this, it looks like not even this constructor is reached.
The server in question is running Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition Service Pack 2, and we are trying to run the program in a Remote Desktop session. (Because of the client's environment, I cannot easily test in a console session right now.)
I reverted my changes from version control, which did not help – but I do not know if I had built myself the previously installed version (which ran just fine even on this server) or if it had been built by someone else.
Have also tried to reinstall the Visual C++ runtime libraries and of course reboot Windows, but neither helped. Now I'm really running out of ideas... Any clues on what I could try or check?
Probably some error occurs but is surpressed e.g. empty catch() statement or similar.
You could try and install Debugging tools for Windows WinDbg to see if you could get more info when trying to run it. Since the download is rather small 25Mb maybe it is possible to install it on your client's PC.
But first check the eventview log for your app, maybe there is something in there that can shed some light.
it starts up windows installer with random applications on my machine . . after i click cancel a few times, it loads vb6 fine.
any ideas why this is happening?
To stop this behavior:
Start VB6
Open the Add-Ins dialog
Uncheck the "Visual Component Manager" Add-In
Source:
After VS2010, SP1, VB6 launches VS2010 installer
This is what a Windows Installer repair looks like. It means that something is broken in one of the installed products on your system. Ideally it's a one-off repair so you might be better off letting it runs its course and do the repair, except of course if it asks for a install CD that you don't have.
The Windows event log (Application) will have MsiInstaller entries saying what product and component has the problem.
It's possible a previous installation has not completed correctly.
Use the utility at the following link to remove any rogue installations files:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301 (broken link Aug.2017, leaving URL for "historical purposes").
As PhilDW has pointed out this is a Windows Installer Self-Repair issue, and can often be resolved by allowing the self-repair to complete once. At other times the problem persists and it should be fixed by other means. Even when the self-repair completes and the problem goes away, it can still resurface once you launch the conflicting application. Windows Installer is not easy to deal with.
In your particular case you might be able to get away with a "workaround" rather than a fix. By locating the main VB6 EXE file on disk (in its main installation directory) and manually creating a shortcut to it on your desktop, you might be able to successfully launch VB6 via this new shortcut without the self-repair kicking in. It might be worth a try.
This shortcut trick will not remove the underlying problem, but might help to "bypass it". Just for the record: the reason this might work is that the new, manually created shortcut is not "advertised" and will not trigger a key-path check of the installed product when launched. This is Windows Installer's way to verify that a product is correctly installed. Note that even if the workaround works, self-repair might still result during application use because of faulty COM data being detected (which is very likely the cause of the whole problem you are seeing, but give the manually created shortcut a try).
There is a rather comprehensive "article" on self-repair here: How can I determine what causes repeated Windows Installer self-repair? which might help to track down the cause of the self-repair kicking off in the first place, but fixing it can be a rather complicated process (so try the workaround first). 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. The last application to launch will overwrite the registry or file system with its own setting.
This worked for me, for VS2010 RC:
"Please wait while windows configures Microsoft Visual studio 2010 Ultimate."
THe work around that fixes the issue for me was to run the following via the admin cmd prompt.
Md "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\common7\IDE\FromGAC"
from http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-SG/vsprereleaseannouncements/thread/572a0f8a-16b0-4e1d-b581-16be36a9b564
This was also happned to me.
Whenever i tried to open vb6, it started windows installer to configure "Autocad".
Autocad had not broken. and it was working fine.
I tried removing and reinstalling Windows Installer, But it did not solved the issue.
Then i installed Microsoft's "Windows Installer Clean Up Utility 2" from given link.
Using this utility i removed the autocad from "Windows Installers" Database.
After that VB6 never started installer again.
Keep in mind 'removing any entry from installer's database may be risky, but i had no choice. So do it on your own risk.
Download "Windows Installer Clean Up Utility 2" (this is a deprecated, unsupported and unsafe tool to use - Aug.2017. I will leave the link in for "historical purposes", don't use it).
I am trying to build a windows service that includes a Lua component, and links with Lua's shared libraries. I am building the code in Eclipse/CDT with MinGW. It builds fine, but when I run it, I get "Application failed to Initialize Properly (0x80000003). Click OK to terminate".
I am looking for clues as to what might be going on. A Hello World program compiles and runs fine, so there are no basic environment issues (I hope!). BTW, I am running on XP Home.
Update:
OK, I have figured out, by some guesswork, what was going on, and thought I'd post this for the benefit of others who might run into a similar problem - I think the lua DLL I was linking to, at runtime, was a different version than the one I built with. This caused the app initialization to fail I guess. When I made them to be the same file, things started working. I have not looked into why this would cause app init to fail, but I guess some symbol being at a different address or something? Or could it be that the DLLs were built with different tool chains?
This might be caused by not having permissions to access the DLLs required by the application. Are you logged in as an Administrator or member of the Administrator group?
Try logging in as Administrator to see if the problem goes away. This will help determine if it's a permissions issue, and then you can explore that further.
You could also try using the Dependency Walker (depends.exe) to see if this highlights any problems.
Cause of this problem is to try to run DOS programs, or 16-bit programs in Windows XP
To run DOS programs, or 16-bit environment in windows xp
To do so go to Start , Run and type gpedit.msc
And there go to:
User Configuration
Administrative Templates
Start Menu and Taskbar
And double-click on
Add "Run in Separate Memory Space" check box to Run dialog box
Select Enabled and then OK.
If the problem is not resolved, we will have to disable the Dr Watson , Do the following:
Go to the Start
Programs
Accessories
System Tools
System Information
Then go to:
Tools
Dr Watson
Or go to Start , Run and type drwtsn32
And disable:
Dump All Thread Contexts
And
Create Crash Dump File
And press:
OK
And then restart your computer .......
And then you will be able to run any game or program is running Dos or 16-bit, within Windows xp.