Error 0xc0000142

[Olly Betts]

On Wed, Oct 09, 2024 at 07:27:51AM +0000, Graham Mullan wrote:
> I am getting this error message 0xc0000142 whenever I attempt to open
> a file in Aven. Any ideas anyone?

This seems to be Microsoft error code STATUS_DLL_INIT_FAILED - sadly
their error reporting is terrible and doesn't say *which* DLL is the
problem (and there are over 100 involved now).

(Hex codes as errors may have been necessary on resource constrained
systems 40 years ago but it also seems ridiculous in 2024 that we don't
get at least a vaguely useful message like "Initialising SOMELIB.DLL
failed"; they don't even seem to have a simple form to look up an error
hex code online.)

I've had two other recent reports of this, but it must only affect a
small subset of users (unless Microsoft usage has dramatically tailed
off).  It seems 1.4.8 is unaffected, so this seems to be related to the
changes in how this version is now built, but it's not really feasible
to go back to the old way unfortunately.

Neither of the other people responded to my request to debug further, so
I still have very little evidence to go on.  My best guess is that
there's a DLL you are missing which most people have installed (probably
because it's used by something else they have installed).  If that is
the explanation we probably just need to identify that missing DLL.  It
could be something entirely different though.

I think the first thing to try is opening a command prompt and seeing
what if anything works - different tools use different sets of DLLs so
would at least narrow down the problem down a bit, and just maybe we'll
get a more helpful error out.

Can you try:

cavern --help

survexport --help

aven --help

aven

You may need first change to the directory where Survex is installed,
which if you accepted the default when you installed is probably
something like:

cd "c:\Program Files\Survex"

If anyone has experience debugging similar issues, please chime in with
suggestions.

Cheers,
    Olly