Strange issue with Lazarus/FreePascal installer

[Talarus Luan]

Greetings, all.

I have been trying to track down an old issue with my Win 8.1 Pro 64 install related to running certain app installs. I am certain the problem is on my end, as I have a handful of other programs/applications which exhibit strange behavior, but it doesn't ultimately prevent me from working around them. The problems all seem to be intermittent, and the most reproducible one is with the Lazarus/FreePascal installer which uses Inno Setup, I believe.

I want to stress that I don't believe that this is an actual Inno Setup problem, but most likely some kind of strange corruption on my system that I have not been able to track down (despite multiple attempts at all the various windows repair processes that include DISM and SFC). The reason I have trudged my dirty Windows galoshes into this wonderful space is in the hope that someone else may recognize the symptoms and have some insights as to what is going on.

Primarily, when I install anything on my system with Inno Setup (primarily just Lazarus and a version of git from a while back), I get errors saying "The source file is corrupt." or "Setup was unable to create the directory {X}. Error 3: The system cannot find the path specified.". The curious part is that, oft times, I get strange characters in the file/path names, and in the text of the messages of the error box. These character substitutions look like something is inserting spurious unicode escapes (like substituting the character "Ȳ" (U+0232) for the number "2" (U+0032) which you will see in the attached screenshots). I can just keep hitting Retry and it will get through the install, and often the program does get properly installed, but sometimes it mis-copies files to directories with those mangled characters. I have always hash-checked the downloaded installer files and the hashes match, so the actual downloaded files are not corrupted.

I only have Windows Defender AV running on this system, and I have turned it off to see if the standard AV monkey wrench might have been causing the problem, but it doesn't seem to have any effect on any of the issues I have, including this one, whether it is on or off.

I want to say that maybe I have some kind of DLL hell conflict, but I have been through so many different utilities and procedures to try and track it down, I really am at the end of my rope trying to figure it out.

For about 99%+ of the things I do on this system, everything else works fine. It's been a maddening issue to try and track down, and I am planning an OS upgrade to fix it once and for all, but I am running into the problem again right now, and thought I'd try one more shot to see if I can fix it.. I just hate not knowing what little gremlins have been tormenting me for so long! :)

Anyway, I have attached some of the error dialogs that come up so you can see the kinds of strangeness that is occurring. If anybody has any insights, I would be most appreciative!

Thank you kindly in advance for any info!

[Eivind Bakkestuen]

Weird. Have you tested your hardware for memory (RAM) corruption?

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[Talarus Luan]

I suppose I should have hit Reply All instead of Reply Author..

Just reposting a bit to confirm for others to see.

Yes, multiple times with both memtest86 and the windows memory checker. Never found even a single bit error. Also installed a couple other AV to see if there was some malware that evaded Defender, but the system seems to be clean of nastyware.

In the case here, it seems almost like there is some string-handling function in a DLL that is mangling the strings in a peculiar way. It doesn't seem to be completely random bit-flips.

[Gavin Lambert]

On 23/08/2022 10:54, Talarus Luan wrote:
> I suppose I should have hit Reply All instead of Reply Author..
> Just reposting a bit to confirm for others to see.
>
> Yes, multiple times with both memtest86 and the windows memory checker.
> Never found even a single bit error. Also installed a couple other AV to
> see if there was some malware that evaded Defender, but the system seems
> to be clean of nastyware.
>
> In the case here, it seems almost like there is some string-handling
> function in a DLL that is mangling the strings in a peculiar way. It
> doesn't seem to be completely random bit-flips.

Check your "language for non-Unicode programs" in the control panel.
Depending on the age of the installer, it may have been built in a
non-Unicode mode that will be affected by that setting; most installs
are only really tested with that set to English or another Latin-1 locale.

[Jernej Simončič]

On Tuesday, August 23, 2022, 00:54:33, Talarus Luan wrote:

Yes, multiple times with both memtest86 and the windows memory checker. Never found even a single bit error.

Try this: install WinRAR, then go to Tools → Benchmark and let it run for a few hours. For some reason WinRAR's benchmark sometimes detects memory corruption that memtest86 and Windows Memory Diagnostic miss.

 

-- 
< Jernej Simončič ><><><><>< https://eternallybored.org/ >

An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance.
       -- Peter's Placebo

[Talarus Luan]

Current Language for non-Unicode programs is set to English (United States), which is the system default setting everywhere else.

[Talarus Luan]

Ran it for 8 hours overnight. No errors found and 500GB processed.