KB956802 (GDI32.dll 5.1.2600.5698) causes problems on Spanish XP

[POZ.James]

Hi there, wonder if anyone can help - the above gdi32.dll version seems to
cause one of our applications to crash on spanish pc's.

For info, the version prior to this (5.1.2600.5512) works fine, however
following installation of KB956802 update (which installs 5.1.2600.5698) our
application crashes with a nice "Report to MS" type error.

This only appears to happen on SPANISH versions of XP as the application
continues to work without any problems on english XP with the same KB update
(albeit the english version) installed.

This has been reported to us by a number of our spanish users, and can be
reproduced on a VM by simply installing this update.

I have tried rebuilding our application on a PC which has this version of
the dll and everything is fine until deployed on a spanish pc.

Any help greatfully received.

Thanks,
James.

[MowGreen]

From the Security Bulletin:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-071.mspx

> Support
> • Customers in the U.S. and Canada can receive technical support from Microsoft Product Support
> Services (http://www.microsoft.com/protect/resources/support.aspx)at 1-866-PCSAFETY. There is no
> charge for support calls that are associated with security updates.
> • International customers can receive support from their local Microsoft subsidiaries. There is no
> charge for support that is associated with security updates. For more information about how to
> contact Microsoft for support issues, visit the International Support Web site
> http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=21155

If this an LOB application, contact MS for no-charge support.
If this application was written by you,, your company, or someone your
company
hired to code it, then suggest you go over the Vulnerability Information
in the Security Bulletin to see what changes have been made to how GDI
handles integer calculations and file size parameters in WMF files.

MowGreen
===============
*-343-* FDNY
Never Forgotten
===============

banthecheck.com
"Security updates should *not* have *non-security content* prechecked"

[POZ.James]

In case anyone else has this problem, I found the source of the problem and a
solution.

Symptoms:-
Application crashes to "report to microsoft" message. Application eventlog
entry indicating gdi32.dll v5.1.2600.5698

Cause:-
The cause of this problem was that our application had a reference to
"Windows API (ANSI)" - (win.tlb) and was calling the GDI32 functions
directly. Every single GDI32 function that was being called caused the
application to crash.

Resolution:
The resolution is pretty simply and to be honest i was suprised the code
didn't already do this.
Basically any function from the API that needs to be used must be declared
in code too...

For example, if you want to use the gdi32 function GetDeviceCaps (Get Device
Capabilities) you can't just call it, you must declare it first.
e.g. (VB6 example)

Private Declare Function GetDeviceCaps Lib "gdi32.dll" (ByVal hdc As Long, _
ByVal nIndex As Long) As Long

Note: Previously this code was working by calling the function directly