"Visual FoxPro 9.0 executable file has stopped working" 1

[Eylon]

Hi guys,
I am a user of a prepackaged software written in Visual FoxPro (working under Windows 8.1).
Whenever I run this software it crashes with "Visual FoxPro 9.0 executable file has stopped working".
Support personnel of the software vendor are clueless...

After browsing several FoxPro forums, I made sure the application's folder contains the 4 essential "runtimes" (actually gdiplus.dll was missing, so I copied it from the Windows\System32 folder).
However, the software would still not run.
Does anyone have a clue what am I missing?
I appreciate any comments or help.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Besides, as your PC likely has VFP itself installed, you have a bigger difference in already registered working C++ and VFP runtimes and some of the OCXes, that come with VFP and are allowed to be redistributed but don't usually exist in Vista or later. There are very few dependencies of VFP with the OS, there are a few kernel functions used for memory management, but surely they are not broken or nothing works.

Oh, and before I forget again, thanks for looking into this even at your weekend.

Bye, Olaf.

Olaf Doschke Software Engineering

https://www.doschke.name

 

[Eylon]

Hi,
Me and Koen were communicating over email, and Koen told me he was able to make "Stock Investor" fully functional with the login credentials I gave him.
IMHO that would mean that the installation file is not broken.
I guess some other thing on my PC is hindering the software.

I could not determine if your discussions about foxuser.dbf or the other stuff are relevant to my case. Are they?

Anyway, I have accepted Koen’s offer to help me reinstall stuff, and see what happens (thanks a lot, Koen, will send you an email shortly).
We’ll probably do that in a couple of days and report about our findings here.
If anyone wants to suggest other remedies in the meantime, I will gladly try them too.

Mike, sorry for not reporting earlier regarding your suggestion.
I right clicked the software's EXE file but was not able to find any menu item resembling “Compatibility Change” other than “Troubleshoot Compatibility”, which resulted in a never-ending search process that I had to terminate.

Regards,
Eylon

 

[Olaf Doschke]

You can still do what I asked and look for the foxuser.dbf, even after you uninstalled everything, this is a file generated by the first run of the software and so it's not among the files insatlled and thus deleted with an uninstallation. I think it still is a good explanation as no matter what else you tried if that file was generated and broken quite early form the first usage, this doesn't repair itself with any further installations and manual renaming of DLLs and de- and reinstallation.

But one thing is good to know, your software download is ok. Maybe Koen will get it to work after cleaning your system a bit from leftovers in the file system and maybe also in the registry.

Bye, Olaf.

Olaf Doschke Software Engineering

https://www.doschke.name

 

[Eylon]

There is no trace of "foxuser.dbf" on my machine at all...
Does this mean anything?

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Just, that I'm clueless what else is causing that problem. You only get fatal errors if either the C++ runtime or something the runtime processes has a defect, eg a table or report or form (even the ones embedded in EXE, you can have bad luck with a compilation) with errors that let the runtime work on a file offset not existing, anything like that.

Since the installation works for Koen, there seems no inherent defect with anything the setup installs. No idea what else could cause your error. A look into the Windows event log and a vfp9err.log might make more clear that it was indeed a C000005 fatal error of the C++ runtime and may point to a line of code, that could only help the vendor to see what happens there, i.e. what file is processed at that point.

But you won't be able to see anything from the event log yourself, it's too full of messages from anything else, too. Before I could explain what to look for, I'd rather need to look myself what to look into, the Windows event log is a bit more complex than just a text log file.

If Koen does a remote session with TeamViewer or Skype or whatever that'll help better than any further instructions for you.

Bye, Olaf.



Olaf Doschke Software Engineering

https://www.doschke.name

 

[Eylon]

Hi Guys. Just a quick update.
Koen did some hard work on my PC: renaming files, copying some of them to other locations, and finally uninstall and reinstall.
Thank you Koen!

However, the symptom remained.
So… I am getting an Upgrade to Win 10 (now I am running Win 8), and will try again.
Hopefully, this will solve this…

Regards,
Eylon

 

[Tore Bleken]

Eylon,

don't upgrade to Win10. Instead do a clean installation of Win10.

 

[Eylon]

Yes, you're right Tore.
Just talked to the technician at the shop and he said the same.

I won't be able to complete this project this week.
Will report ASAP.
Thanks!

 

[Tore Bleken]

What I did, was to buy a new SSD HD, and install Win10 on that. I also bought an external cabinet for my old HD, and connected it via USB. After a while, when I know that everything works as expected, I will reformat the old HD and use it for backup or as a portable media.

 

[Koen Piller]

Eylon,
I think Tore gave you a very good solution.
Meanwhile buy a cheap lowcost win10 laptop and install only SI on that pc.
No need for an extra browser, nor an antivirus as this is all implented in WIN10.
When your old PC is executed with a SSD as Tore advises you can always backup from that lowcost laptop.
Regards,
Koen

 

[Mike Gagnon]

Eylon

Mike, sorry for not reporting earlier regarding your suggestion.
I right clicked the software's EXE file but was not able to find any menu item resembling “Compatibility Change” other than “Troubleshoot Compatibility”, which resulted in a never-ending search process that I had to terminate.

I meant the icon, not the executable.

Mike Gagnon

If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ184-2483 first.

 

[Eylon]

Mike,
I am getting the same menu and same process.
Does your suggestion function under Win8.1?

 

[Olaf Doschke]

“Troubleshoot Compatibility”, which resulted in a never-ending search process that I had to terminate.

Such a thing points out you may have fiddled too much with OS files and reg keys already, manually or using cleanup and repair tools. Seems you removed a portion of the OS itself. Moving to Win10 will be a good move to get a stable system again.

Bye, Olaf.



Olaf Doschke Software Engineering

https://www.doschke.name

 

[Mike Gagnon]

Eylon
I am getting these options

Mike Gagnon

If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ184-2483 first.

 

[Dan Olsson]

If you run this from a network drive, this option isn't avaliable (for some reason which I don't know)

 

[Koen Piller]

Mike,

To get an to come to that screen I have to do:
RIghtclick on the icon -> Properties ->Comtability (Tab) -> click on the Checkbox (translated) "Execute this program in comptability modus for" -> select from the combobox (which becames enabled after activating the checkbox) one of the displayed options.

Afterall same as you, only a little bit different path to get it and a little bit different prompt.
Maybe we have a different WIN(10) version?

& Eylon
This option was not tried when we had a TV session, would you care / be able to do it now?

Regards,

Koen

 

[Eylon]

Hi Guys,

1. I was finally able to find what mike was referring to (compatibility options). As is with Koen, this menu is accessible through a slightly different path on my machine.
Anyway, what do you guys suggest as the “best” OS to choose? I have a selection range from Win 95 to Win 8 (and also XP and Vista). I’ve already tried Win 7 and got Error #171 from FoxPro (which occurred also before I touched this).

2. I looked on some SSDs on the market, but then I figured I should check what kinds can my hardware support at all. According to the following page from the manufacturer Link my PC can have “Up to 1TB 5400 rpm HDD or 128 SSD”.

Do you really believe I can’t have more than 128 GB on SSD?! That’s awfully small…
I sent Lenovo a query about that, but still waiting for someone to get back to me.
Any ideas where I can verify that?

Thanks.
Eylon

 

[Tore Bleken]

If your PC can use a 1TB HD, I'm 99.99% sure that the same goes for a SSD.

 

[Olaf Doschke]

If you go for SSD, and I'm with Tore - I see no reason it should only be covered for 1/8th of the size, your minimum OS should be Windows 8, as previous would waer your SSD more than necessary. 'Only since Windows 8 the handling of SSDs is friendly towards their lifetime and performance.

If a software needs an older OS a solution is a VM with that OS, on that idea XP mode was invented and you don't depend on the OS managing something like that, you can always do that yourself. Emulated hardware can be treated anyway, the final treatment is done on the host OS level, so in that case a Win8 host system can run XP, Vista or Win7, you can also run later OSes on a host, for my first Win10 I was using the Betaversion download and installed that in a VM on Win7. And indeed you can safely run XP as you can configurte a VM to always go back to it's initial state when you restart it. Software making use of a database server installed on the host or a server in the network would not need to keep local file updates, this way you can have halfways safe XP systems, though it's always risky to run them when they become the initially infected machine they can infect host and other real machines, too.

But your system seems to be worn out from too much interfereing with it. There are lots of half baked hints in reg key meanings, performance tuning and security hacks out that, which do more harm than help and -sorry - but you halfways proved you're not good at following instructions as given. Might be partially about circumstances, but even tools like the popular ccleaner can do things not really good for the stability of a system. When you get errors in software working on other computers, that might be hardware, but in most cases it's softzware problems from manually fiddling with the system, forgetting to do regular system updates.

VFP9 shows no deficiency on any Windows version, I notice difficulties with General fields, but it's recommended to not use them at all since many OSes already, so I don't count that as a Win10 problem. So far in respect of VFP applications made with VFP9 I would always recommend the most recent OS.

The case with your software running on Koens computer shows it's not the fault of the software installer or Windows10. VFP only uses some very core functions of the OS, the C++ 7.1 runteim and then it's own, it has very few OS dependent things, for some XML functionalities it depens on MSXML3 (CurstoTtoxml/xmltocursor) and MSXML4 (xmladapter and other classes), I wouldn't to XML Services the VFP way with the deprecated Soap Toolkit anymore, so that's less important and there are other libraries to work with XML, but indeed many MSXML library versions can be installed in parallel.

Besdies that I don't remmeber much deppendencies. Ther's the topic of themes, but you can turn them off. The errors you experienced are riddling me, the major dependence is the one to the msvcrt71.dll and no more. Anything else would likely be problems of third party add-ons, OCXes, but again, as the software runs for Koen, this seems to be rooted in some problem of your system, not the Windows version, just the current condition of your system. And it riddles me, because with so little dependency on OS the only real problematic part is the msvcrt71.dll, the core functions about memory allocation adn things like that work for every application and will never be a problem or the whole system is problematic. There is no OS causing more fatal errors than another, C5 are partly bugs of the VFP runtime triggered by unexpected cases of corrupted sections of VFP files lie the dbf structure, frx structure, just lkike a ZIP file with a specifically prepared byte comnbination can cause a tool like Winzip to fail. And fixes of these types of errors are made in the VFPXr.dll runtime, not in a later OS more stable, the point is to never trust and expect certain structures to be as expeced, don't blindly follow pointers into places of a file not even existing, for example.

VFP9 is the most stable VFP version and so far there is no past OS most stable for it than the current one. You could perhaps say XP was the best OS for VFP6/7 and some may already have decided Win7 was best for VFP9, but likely they'd not only say that in reference to VFP9, but because Win8/8.1/10 was not their cup of tea.

Just from the perspective of security I'd always only use the latest. Some conditions can bind you, I fight with a specific OCX and my customer isn't learning from all evidence this control has to be eliminated, he's rather willing to try XP VMs, because that OCX was created at Win95/98 times. It must have been expensive, but just like first Scanners or CD drives or mobiles once were very expensive, newer devices are cheaper and better. And you have to think about investing into renewal also in things like software, there is no manual wear, but there always is aging, even in software.

Bye, Olaf.

Olaf Doschke Software Engineering

https://www.doschke.name

 

[Olaf Doschke]

One last question about the integrity of your download and installed DLLs: Did you forward your download to Koen or did you just give him the download link to the software? Because it could still be just your download being defect, missing a few bytes only can let it still work in general but extract wrong files. Such errors can be a cascading effect of some single bitflips, so also HDD defects may cause this. The best way to check files is knowing their checksums and not just file date or product version.

Bye, Olaf.

Olaf Doschke Software Engineering

https://www.doschke.name