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 Post subject: Winstep broken after Dragging icon to "pinned" section.
PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2017 2:31 am 
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I've been using Winstep for a week or so now and am loving it and have been using it as a replacement to Windows 10's taskbar. I seem to have broken it about 10-15 minutes ago and can't seem to even open the program again.

I can't reproduce the issue as I can't even get the dock open again.
Note: I have my dock set to show running programs.

What I did: Dragged Komodo Edit from the right side of the separator to the left side to pin it / keep it there after closing the program. Error message shows up after right-clicking icon in the icon tray on the taskbar and selecting "Preferences." Left-clicking does nothing. The error I'm getting has the message of "Unknown (&H104C0000)" I've included a screenshot below.

Clicking "Retry" on the message box causes the icon in the icon tray to become unresponsive and ultimately the program will close after a few seconds. Clicking "Cancel" causes the message box to exit immediately, as expected.

Error:
Image

Event Log (if helpful):
Image

Actions I've tried already:
    - Restart the NeXuS program.
    - Log out and back in.
    - Hard restart machine.

Environment:
    OS: Windows 10 Education (64-bit)
    CPU: Intel i7-4910MQ
    GPU: Intel HD 4600 & nVidia Quadro K2100M
    RAM: 8GB DDR3


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 Post subject: Re: Winstep broken after Dragging icon to "pinned" section.
PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2017 4:19 am 
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Unknown errors are fun! Especially in OLEAUT32.DLL. :P

Lets try the following:

Open the Windows Registry Editor (RegEdit.exe), navigate to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WinSTEP2000\NeXuS

then click File -> Export.

Send the file over to the Winstep support address please so I can have a look at it.

Also, from what I understood, Nexus is now crashing as soon as it starts?

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Jorge Coelho
Winstep Xtreme - Xtreme Power!
http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies


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 Post subject: Re: Winstep broken after Dragging icon to "pinned" section.
PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2017 4:55 am 
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I've sent the email just now.

As for "crashing as soon as it starts," not quite.
It will run, however the dock does not get displayed in the icon tray as such:
Image
It will stay there without crashing, however it does nothing when clicked (not sure if it's supposed to or not), and right-clicking and clicking "Preferences" brings about the error window in the opening post.

After clicking "Retry", it does nothing. Upon clicking "Preferences" again, it closes without an error message, but leaves an error in the Event Viewer with some crash information.

Clicking "Cancel" either of the times closes the program, which seems like expected behavior.


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 Post subject: Re: Winstep broken after Dragging icon to "pinned" section.
PostPosted: Fri Mar 31, 2017 5:21 am 
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What makes you think the crash is related to you pinning Komodo Edit to the dock then? Apart from this issue when trying to open Preferences via the system tray icon, is the dock itself working correctly?

Also, what happens when you press CTRL+F11 (it should open Nexus Preferences)?

Sincerely, I think this is instead related to a corrupt/mismatched DLL, possibly because of some application installed recently (if this error was not happening before).

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Jorge Coelho
Winstep Xtreme - Xtreme Power!
http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies


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 Post subject: Re: Winstep broken after Dragging icon to "pinned" section.
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 1:39 am 
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I don't believe that the crash was directly caused by Komodo Edit, but rather I just stated that as the exact action that I did that triggered the crashing. Also, the dock does not open at all.

Interestingly enough, Ctrl+F11 seems to bring about a different error dialog with a reference to "Access Violation." Hitting Apply or Okay causes additional Access Violations.

Image

It might be worthy to note, if it'll help track down where the error is being caused, that each and every time this happens, the dialog comes up two additional times when pressing "Retry."

After the third press, the preferences window will pop up. Additionally, navigating to either the "Appearance" or "Themes" tab will cause the Access Violation error dialog to come up again, with retry just causing the error dialog to pop up again. The issue here is similar to the above issue where after clicking "Retry" a bunch of times, it seems to let me through to the tab.

I've tried the suggested fix in this forum post, however nothing seems to have come from it. Additionally, there are no third-party extensions installed for WinStep.

My preferences seem to be incorrect as well, so I'd be fine with reinstalling at this point. Is there any additional information that I can provide that might help provide more information for the issue if you think it'll help in the future?

Since my preferences were already lost, I went ahead and "Reset Everything," which caused the dock to reappear, but the issue of Access Violations remains. I'm planning on reimaging my laptop within the next few days as well, so hopefully if the issue is of corrupted Windows files then that should be solved.

(Image of the dock/access violations)
Image


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 Post subject: Re: Winstep broken after Dragging icon to "pinned" section.
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 2:00 am 
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Access Violation or other errors when opening certain tabs in Preferences are always the result of a mismatched or corrupt DLL or OCX (these are the files responsible for drawing the controls on the tabs). The fault lying in OLEAUT32.DLL (responsible for handling OLE automation) also points this way.

Normally problems occur with a corrupt/incompatible version of Microsoft's own Comctl32.ocx (responsible for some 'special' common controls such as sliders, etc...) being installed by another application, but that does not seem to be the case there since the Themes tab has none of those controls. My guess would go for a problem with NextControls.ocx (Winstep's own controls, responsible for the Color Well controls, for instance) or OLEAUT32.DLL itself.

My advice at this point is to re-install Nexus, see if that fixes the problem. First try a 'install on top' (i.e.; do not uninstall first, just exit Nexus then run setup again). If that doesn't work, try a full uninstall (make sure to tell the application to uninstall everything when prompted) followed by another re-install.

Then please let me know if that helped. :)

Also, you are NOT running a Windows 10 Insider (beta) version, are you?

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Jorge Coelho
Winstep Xtreme - Xtreme Power!
http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies


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 Post subject: Re: Winstep broken after Dragging icon to "pinned" section.
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 2:10 am 
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Joined: Fri Mar 31, 2017 2:02 am
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I'll try those steps you've mentioned and respond back once I'm done.

I'm on Windows 10 Education (Build 14393), and not in the insider or fast-ring branches. I did just notice a slightly different event in the event viewer this time, which could also be the cause of the issues.

The event data references ntdll.dll over OLEAUT32.DLL, which would lead me to believe there's an issue with those files. I was under the assumption that these would be more lower-level files needed across the system that wouldn't have write access so easily, but I guess I'm wrong there.

Full Data:
Quote:
Problem signature:
P1: Nexus.exe
P2: 17.1.0.1081
P3: 588b20ab
P4: ntdll.dll
P5: 10.0.14393.479
P6: 58256ca0
P7: c0000005
P8: 000827cb
P9:
P10:


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 Post subject: Re: Winstep broken after Dragging icon to "pinned" section.
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 2:20 am 
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Joined: Fri Mar 31, 2017 2:02 am
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Good news -- the "install on top" suggestion worked perfectly!
Thanks for the help, and thanks for developing Winstep!
It makes Windows 10 a lot more palatable to me, as I'd prefer to use Linux with Cinnamon as a daily driver but have to stick with Windows due to Windows-only development tools for my work as a Software Engineer.
I'll also be looking at buying the Xtreme edition in the near future since the software doesn't appear to be abandoned and I enjoy using it!

Image


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 Post subject: Re: Winstep broken after Dragging icon to "pinned" section.
PostPosted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 2:37 am 
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The problem with these type of issues is that they be caused by basically anything, from mismatched DLLs to 3rd party software hooking into other processes (such as AV software, for instance).

I remember nVidia and Logitech software causing a multitude of problems to other applications because of doing this.

Finding the true culprit in these situations is never easy. For instance, in the previous version Nexus started using MP3 sound files for the clock and mail voice announcements, etc... All the application does is pass the MP3 file path to the system and Windows takes care of actually playing it.

So simple that it shouldn't have caused any problems, right? Wrong. MP3 files are nothing but containers to compressed raw data, and there are a TON of different compression formats out there. To expand that data, you need something called a decoder (codec) installed on your system. Because there are a ton of different formats, there are also a ton of different codecs, most of them NOT made by Microsoft (which is why you have huge codec collections such as K-LITE and many others).

Well, *some* users suddenly started experiencing some very weird crashes and application instability. Turns out that those codecs run inside the process asking Windows to play the file, not Windows itself, so if a codec is buggy and corrupts memory or does something equally nasty, it is the host application that eventually crashes, without giving away any clue to the real culprit.

There is a multi-page thread on this forum detailing how hard it was and how long it took to figure out what was actually going on. When it was finally established it was a codec problem, since I cannot fix 3rd party code the only solution was to play those MP3 files using a separate executable instead of playing them via the application itself. This small executable would play the MP3 file and then immediately exit - this way, even if a particular system had one of those problematic codecs, the main application (Nexus) would remain safe. Doing this solved the problems some users had been experiencing.

Crazy, isn't it? :) With so many possible hardware and software interactions, I sometimes think it's a small miracle that anything actually works lol

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Jorge Coelho
Winstep Xtreme - Xtreme Power!
http://www.winstep.net - Winstep Software Technologies


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