Re: Lua app crash with mixed DLLs; advice needed

[marbux <marbux@...>]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Thijs Schreijer
<thijs@thijsschreijer.nl> wrote:

> MSVCRT.DLL has its roots in Windows, and there are multiple versions of it. Each Windows version (and possible patches/fixes/servicepacks) has a different version. These tend to be backward compatible, except for deprecated functionality.

There are some major speed bumps in the Visual Studio 6.x CRT backward
compatibility (also in some other runtimes) that weren't successfully
bridged until SP-3 (SP-1 for MFC42.DLL). These were caused by
post-beta testing/last minute changes requested by the Windows NT
team.  Between the time of the changes and release of VS 6.0,
Microsoft used that version of VS to update their entire line of
Christmas market home apps, all of which installed the defective DLLs.
Hundreds of ISV apps were broken as those DLLs were installed, with
the most prominent being all three major WordPerfect Office 8 and 9
apps and AOL's customized version of  MSIE, none of which could even
load.

Rather than doing a product recall on all of their home apps,
Microsoft aimed for a bridging solution but didn't get it right until
SP-3 of Visual Studio. Microsoft pushed patches for the runtimes via
Windows Update for SP-1, SP-2, and SP-3 called Libraries Update, but
the bottom line is that if the code was compiled with Visual Studio
6.0 and is troublesome and Dependency Walker points to MSVCRT.DLL or
any of the other files listed at
<http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197298>, one needs to look at the
update status of the instance of Visual Studio 6.0 used to compile.

The backward compatibility bug in MSVCRT.DLL and its resolution is
described at <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/190536/EN-US>. You can
get further clues that the problem might be related to this issue if
the error message is "invalid page fault in module MSVCRT.DLL", KB
190536, and/or by making sure that  the files specified in KB 197298
have at least the identified version numbers or higher.

I owned and operated WordPerfect Universe, <http://www.wpuniverse.com>
at the time as a hobby and went through about 6 months of
uninterrupted dependency hell doing tech support for these issues.
There was no one-size-fits-all work-around for the issues because the
problems varied by which programs the user had installed that
introduced what mixture of broken DLLs and by which program first
called the various run times during a given session. After each of the
first two unsucccessful library updates, the mix of symptoms changed.
All that and trying to keep my law practice afloat at the same time;
I'll never forget that period of my life.

Best regards,

Paul