consider a situation in which you're trying to start a subsequent
application which depends on a DLL which is missing on the system.
Usually you get a GUI box telling you that a DLL is missing.

However, if you don't want that, because you want to handle all such
errors in the parent process (in your own framework), you can call
SetErrorMode(SEM_FAILCRITICALERRORS).  So you have something along these
lines:

  SetErrorMode (SEM_FAILCRITICALERRORS);
  CreateProcess ("someprocess", "commandline", NULL, NULL, TRUE,
                 0, NULL, NULL, &si, &pi))
  handle_potential_errors ();

If you do this on Windows XP, it works fine.  No error box is opened.
Thus you can handle the problem in your own code.  Nice!

If you do the same on Vista or Server 2008, you lost.  Even though
SetErrorMode(SEM_FAILCRITICALERRORS) has been called, a box appears:

  someprocess.exe has stopped working

  Windows can check online for a solution to the problem.

  -> Check online [...]
  -> Close the program

  V View problem details

And the problem details contains the well-known fact that a DLL
is missing and the status code is 0xc0000135.

To avoid this box on Vista/2008, you must call

  SetErrorMode (SEM_FAILCRITICALERRORS | SEM_NOGPFAULTERRORBOX);

in the parent process.  This appears to be at least an unnecessary
and backward incompatible change, but actually I think this is a bug.

A DLL was missing.  A missing DLL is *not* a general protection fault
and treating the status code STATUS_DLL_NOT_FOUND as a GP fault is...
a fault.

And it's a bug that the GUI box appears at all.  If you set the error
mode to 0, *two* boxes appear on the screen, one to inform the user that

  This application has failed to start because foo.dll was
  not found.  Re-installing the application may fix the problem.

and then, after the user has confirmed that box, the second box
described above appears.

Is there any chance that this can be fixed in Vista/2008?

Thanks,
Corinna

--
Corinna Vinschen
Cygwin Project Co-Leader
Red Hat