Illegal Operation

[chrisjohnson]

Occasionally, when my users run VFP 6.0 SP5, They get the error message "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." The Details button shows "LAUNCHER caused a general protection fault in module GDI.EXE at 0001:00005631." (Launcher is my exe that in turn runs other .app files). I have checked the video properties and some have drivers specific to their monitors but others are using the generic vga drivers. Most have 16 bit color set. Does anyone have any suggstions? Thanks.

 

[rgbean]

You are correct in assuming it's likely a video driver problem. While you are obviously using the newest VFP code, what OS's is this happening under? Have they applied all the appropriate updates available to the OS?

What kind of system memory are these workstations running? I've found that when the user is running NO other programs, all but the most trivial VFP 6.0 applications "require" 64MB on Win 95/98/ME and 128MB on WinNT/2000. Since you're LAUNCHER is actually firing up a 2nd, presumably non-trivial, VFP 6.0 application, then these RAM requirement would seem to apply, and be even higher if other "large" programs (e.g. Outlook, Word, Excel) are also in use.

Rick

 

[chrisjohnson]

Thanks for the reply. Everyone has Win 95 4.00.950 B with 128MB. The problem seems to have started when the company installed a PeopleSoft accounting package on the Ibm mainframe. Everyone accesses it using the company intranet with IE 5.0 They click on a link and something called Citrix runs which requires a login and then presents a Win 2000 professional interface, all within the browser. It's almost like running PcAnywhere. Anyway, the problem seems to occur when this is running. I've seen the message appear when I alt-tab back to VFP, when the launcher.exe is exited, and also when Vfp is sitting in the background doing nothing. I feel this is not entirely foxpro's fault, but, since I have no control over PeopleSoft and since no other application is affected, I am trying to see if there are things that I can adjust to try to keep Vfp from crashing.

 

[rgbean]

Chris,
While "no other application is affected", I'd be curious to see what would happen if someone opened a Word document that included a macro that fires up Excel to get some data to merge in the Word document. This would probably "execise" the machine in a similar way to what your LAUNCHER does.

I wish you luck in your search for a "fix" to this one, maybe you could suggest they put your app on the citrix server and run it that way - it would eliminate your need for a launcher since the code would now run elsewhere.

Rick

 

[chpicker]

You're correct, GDI.EXE is the Windows Graphics Device Interface. Since FoxPro doesn't really allow any low-level programming, it's unlikely that the error is anything in your program. In my experience, the single most common cause of crashes in GDI.EXE were either memory related or video related, whether bad video cards or just outdated drivers. I suggest checking for newer drivers for the video cards on the machines and checking the memory in them. Does it happen to all of them or just a few?