My one friend has had a strange problem that he asked me to help him out with in which his source code is C++ and confidential because he doesnt want anyone stealing his ideas/software etc, so I cant share the source code, but under one of his test systems the application is crashing.
It is written in MS Visual C++ 2008.
Here is the behavior on his 3 systems he is testing it on. Reason for 3 systems is because he initially tested it on the Pentium III 1Ghz and that is when he was having crashes and so he then copied his stand alone application to the Pentium 4 and it ran fine, he dug out an old Pentium II 450Mhz with lesser RAM and processing power to see what would happen also running Windows XP Pro SP3, and it ran slower but didnt crash, so its something up with the Pentium III 1Ghz dell laptop system that is causing the crashes.
Pentium II 450Mhz 256MB RAM XP Pro SP3 OS - Program Runs with No Problems, although kind of slow
Pentium III 1Ghz 640MB RAM XP Pro SP3 OS - Crashes at certain places in the program, always at the same spot in the application.
Pentium 4 1.7Ghz 1GB RAM XP Home SP3 - Program Runs with No Problems and ok pace.
I suggested to him to run memtest86 on it and he did and it passed 4 passes of memtest 86 so the RAM checked out ok. I then said why dont you wipe that system clean and reinstall XP Pro and fully patch it to SP3, so he did that and tested it again and once again it crashed aways at the same places.
I then suggested running other tests on the hardware to test the hardware for problems, so we burned in the 1Ghz Pentium 3 with various stress tests and it held up through them. Also did hard drive tests on it to make sure that its not a virtual memory issue with a troubled hard drive. Everything passed hardware wise.
Looked up his error which I didnt write down to share here, but it was one of those would you like to send this error to Microsoft and it was a BEX error with P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, P6, P7 etc with hex info after some of the P number spots, but on Google it pointed to the issue potentially being caused by (DEP) Data Execution Prevention, and a source at this google hit suggested adding the EXE to a list of programs that are not managed under (DEP), but the problem remains even when rebooting the system.
Since his program is not malicious he went through this process to see if he would have different results, but it still crashed even with DEP set to ignore this EXE.
So I told him that maybe we need to check between the 2 like systems to see what the resource differences there are for .Net etc because all hardware checks are coming out ok. But instead of throwing all sorts of stuff at it such as VC Redist's etc to see if one of them solves this, I thought it would be interesting to see if the problem could be found with some sort of software utility that shows what resources are used for programs, in which maybe there is a system file on this one system that is out of date from the other 2 systems etc or we can copy the dll's from one system to the other until we find the one that patches this issue, or maybe I am off the beaten path and both systems check out as a match.
To share some of what this program does, without giving away his secrets since it is confidential, he programmed up a C++ final project program as part of a college project that he continued to build on from the small project that it first was and he wants to market it someday or sell it off. I told him that he should probably bring it over to a newer IDE such as Visual C++ 2010, but he is working with 2008 for now. He has a mySQL Database that he created from scratch that his application interfaces with, and it keeps track of information gathered etc. Personally I am not sure if what he has is something he can make money on, but all the power to him to try to make money on it. The program is crashing when the form that is populated with data with the C++ visual interface completes the entry and performs its refresh for another entry with the mySQL database. And just this one computer is having issues.
The mySQL database is located on his 4th computer that is acting as a server, so the server is not local to the system running the program. He has also shut off the XP firewall and tried all sorts of stuff thinking trying to shotgun the problem. I told him that the exception for the mySQL port 3306 is plenty, and works on the 2 other systems, so its not the firewall. He also has a newer computer, his Windows 7 system that this program he wrote also runs without any problems and the mySQL database runs flawlessly.
Versus just tossing this Pentium III off to the wayside, he wants to understand why it is crashing because if he knows why, he may be able to perform a bugfix in his code to prevent this from happening to someone else later if and when he sells his product. And since all hardware tests seem to check out ok, him and I are looking for a needle in a haystack to find the cause. I tested this program on 3 of my systems running Windows XP Home and Pro all SP3 and they run fine. Also tested it on my one Windows 7 machine and its also running fine when he brought a copy of his mySQL database server to my house on one of his older laptops to connect to my LAN over Static IP Addresses and test it out.
The only other thing I have not tested yet is if its a Network Adapter issue ( driver etc ) since this laptop is connected to the mySQL server over a LAN and the database is not local to the EXE that is interfacing with it, but I have never seen a network issue cause a crash like this before and that is why I expect to find a local resource issue that is causing this with a system file etc. And as far as the NIC goes on this Pentium 3, I have seen it work because we used this same laptop after setting back to dynamic to look up the error message on google with it.
