AB3.1c crashes when displaying open/save dialog boxes

[Golf33]

In the last couple of days Army Builder has started to misbehave when trying to open or save files using the save/open file dialog boxes.

The problem occurs the second time either dialog box is displayed in an Army Builder session. From two to five seconds after the dialog box displays, Army Builder exits to windows without any user input and without displaying any error messages.

The only things I can think of that have recently changed on this computer are:

1. Updated Windows Media Player to version 11
2. Updated Mozilla Firefox to version 2.0.0.2

Has anyone else encountered this?

I've tried refreshing the 40K data files (which are the only ones I use), and I've tried downloading a new AB3.1c installer and installing it over the top of the existing setup. Neither worked.

[rob]

At 01:50 AM 3/22/2007, you wrote:

In the last couple of days Army Builder has started to misbehave when trying to open or save files using the save/open file dialog boxes.

The problem occurs the second time either dialog box is displayed in an Army Builder session. From two to five seconds after the dialog box displays, Army Builder exits to windows without any user input and without displaying any error messages.

The only things I can think of that have recently changed on this computer are:

1. Updated Windows Media Player to version 11
2. Updated Mozilla Firefox to version 2.0.0.2

Has anyone else encountered this?

I've tried refreshing the 40K data files (which are the only ones I use), and I've tried downloading a new AB3.1c installer and installing it over the top of the existing setup. Neither worked.

Yikes! I haven't heard of anything like this ever happening with AB. And the only things I can think of that could cause this to occur are nasty. AB uses the standard Windows mechanisms for all open/save/etc operations. Those mechanisms are really quite simple, so there's everything pretty much always works or always fails (if we don't have the code right). So there's nothing I can imagine within AB that would cause this to fail for you and remain working for everyone else.

My best guess is that you've installed a new update to a security program that doesn't play nice and doesn't behave properly when it intercepts the standard Windows mechanisms to insert its "protection". You probably have your security tool(s) configured to always auto-update themselves, since that's the suggested - albeit dangerous - behavior. If you allow this, you have ZERO control over when updates are applied and no way to know when changes are made, so you've got no way to roll back to an older version either.

Try completely disabling all security tools on our computer. Does the problem persist? If not, then it's clearly the problem. Unfortunately, the problem might not actually go away by disabling security. If the security tool is improperly patching the Windows interface, it will unpatch itself when you disable the security. Instead, the patch will still be invoked and will simply skip over the security steps before calling the normal Windows stuff. So an invalid patch could still be returning improper results to AB and causing the crash.

Beyond this, I'm not sure what to tell you. There has to be something on your system that is causing the problem, but I don't know what it is beyond the suggestions above. Perhaps someone else here has additional insights they can offer.

Hope this helps....

[Golf33]

Thanks Rob. I understand what you are saying about the dialogs - they are all standard MFC-type functions, aren't they?

The really odd thing is it seemed to only be if the same menu is opened twice - e.g. if I go File > Load, then do it again. If I display the load menu, cancel out of it, display the import file menu, cancel out of that, and go back to the file load menu, it seems to work OK.

[rob]

At 02:11 AM 3/26/2007, you wrote:

Thanks Rob. I understand what you are saying about the dialogs - they are all standard MFC-type functions, aren't they?

The really odd thing is it seemed to only be if the same menu is opened twice - e.g. if I go File > Load, then do it again. If I display the load menu, cancel out of it, display the import file menu, cancel out of that, and go back to the file load menu, it seems to work OK.

That's more than likely indicative of a problem with something installed on your system. Without anything "special" installed, performing a File/Open the first time passes a few moments while it retrieves the appropriate information. Doing it a second time incurs no lag because that information has been cached. My guess is that whatever is installed on your computer is improperly handling the caching aspect and causing AB to crash as a result.

Hope this helps....