NTVDM.exe has stopped working.

[Foxprox26]

Howdy, fellow Luddites!

I say that in the friendliest way! I too am still tasked with supporting programs written in FoxPro for DOS version 2.6 and I'm assisting a client who is replacing a bunch of computers with Windows 7 32-bit systems on which he wants to run old programs written in this version of FoxPro. Who am I to argue with a fee-paying client!

The conversion has actually gone very smoothly. The only issue we've encountered is sometimes upon clicking the PIF shortcut file, we get a fatal error for the software and a Windows message with this warning:

NTVDM.exe has stopped working.

Whether we tell Windows to "investigate" or not, we never get any solutions.

The only "fix" is to reboot the computer and 99% of the time this IS a fix.

My thinking is some other daily activity on the PC, which is used for Internet, email, Skype and other more recent software apps has changed a setting which leads to an incompatibility between this Windows driver and the old Foxprox.exe executable.

Ideally, I'd like to know if there's a way to remove the problem permanently. Recently one PC had to be rebooted twice in a row to get FoxPro back and this isn't an ideal situation on a busy day.

Anyone encounter this?

Thanks for your help in advance!

 

[Dan Freeman]

It's kind of an amazing feat that it runs at all consider how aggressive FPD was about grabbing memory.

Have you tried setting the program's compatibility mode to a prior version of Windows?

 

[DSummZZZ]

I run into this scenario quite often. Instead of rebooting though, most of the time you can just kill the NTVDM process from task manager and that fixes it. I have also had issues at times getting a general protection fault if Internet Exploder was running on the machine before the FoxPro app was started.

You may be able to write a little .BAT file using taskkill to make it available to a user having issues:

taskkill /IM ntvdm.exe /F



-Dave Summers-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm

 

[Foxprox26]

Thanks for the feedback. Actually I solved this just by setting the PIF to run in Windows XP (SP3)compatibility mode. Frankly, I never thought it would be that simple. <Knock on wood> it hasn't happened since.

RIGHT-CLICK the shortcut, go to PROPERTIES then COMPATIBILITY, then "Run this program in compatibility mode for"... Windows XP (Service Pack 3.)

Case closed!

 

[DSummZZZ]

Glad it's working, but my issues were all on computers running XP. I haven't had the problem with W7 yet.


-Dave Summers-

Even more Fox stuff at:

http://www.davesummers.net/foxprolinks.htm

 

[keat63]

If I change compatibility mode on w7, I get an error.
Will post more details when back in the office.