APPCRASH - ntdll.dll

[Robert Campsmith]

Hello All,

One of my users reported an PPCRASH while running my program. I was able
to reproduce this also. Unfortunately it appears to be 'random', but
always referencing the Microsoft "ntdll.dll". I am running Win7 and so
is my customer. I cannot reproduce this error on WinXP.

It seems to be happening in an area of the program that is taking input
from a get then writing that data to disk. This is pretty basic code
that has remained more-or-less unchanged since Clipper 5.2e.

Has anyone else experienced this? I will keep testing to see if I can
narrow it down to one line of code.

According to the crash log, there are 52 modules loaded. My program .exe
and xHBZipDll.dll all the rest are from Windows folders, both 'syswow64'
and 'system32'

Thanks,
-- Robert

[Ella Stern]

Hello,

Suggestion for the hardware technician deserving the problemous
computer: in this list
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/a/ntdlldll.htm
check causes [7], [9], [10], [13]

Ella

[Robert Campsmith]

Hello Ella,

Thanks for the response. I have already looked at that document and a
number of others that all try to point to more or less the same thing.

Maybe you have a loose cable, maybe you have a corrupted file, maybe you
need to get new drivers, maybe you need to re-install your entire
windows OS.

Maybe not!

I belive that there is some "call" being made to ntdll.dll from my
program compiled by xHarbour, that is either not calling with the
correct parameters or is not properly handling the return. Since it
does not crash at exactly the same point in the program every time it
crashes, I cannot put in a bunch of little debug statements to try to
catch this devil.

What I do know is that it always crashes in the same general area of the
source code. It is prompted, apparently, by the user doing repetitious
things. In this case, the user is entering student academic grades. This
consists of viewing a list of classes, selecting the correct class,
pressing a key to enter the input/validate cycle, writing the data to
disk and finally escaping to return to the list to possibly select
another class or escape to leave the list or escape to leave that
student. This makes me think that there might be some sort of "stack"
problem involved.

I have already tried putting in a number of "CLEAR GETS" even where they
should not be needed, in the idea that maybe the get system is involved.
Is there some other sort of "clear stack" statement that I should be
using?

As I mentioned, it does not happen on my WinXP box and most of my other
users, doing the same thing, do not report this APPCRASH problem. In my
mind, this is fairly important, because I know that over the coming
summer, many of my customers will be upgrading to Windows 7 and I cannot
be caught with my proverbial pants down!

I have had other programs throw an APPCRASH involving ntdll.dll as the
named culprit. Unfortunately there are at least a half dozen ntdll.dll
files available for download from the Internet. Unfortunately they are
of varying sizes and dates. Which one is the correct one? I keep my
system updated from Microsoft on their 'Automatic' basis, so I don't
think any of my files are 'out of date', and I don't want to start
arbitrarily replacing drivers and dll's just for something to do. More
than one 'Registry Checker' programs have reported that all is well.

It is difficult to believe that no one using xHarbour has not
experienced this and my other pending problem that xHbZipDll.dll will
not restore zipped files on Win7.

Thanks,
-- Robert

[swaminaray...@gmail.com]