Error 0xc0000142

[Graham Mullan]

Thanks Olly

I'm not on that machine ATM, so I'll try your suggestions when I am. 

As a complete novice in this sort of stuff, there's one thing that stands out from your post:

You say that the probable installation directory is "c:\Program Files\Survex" however, it's actually "c:\Program Files (x86)\Survex" and has been since I went onto Windows 64 bit, as Survex always describes itself as being a 32 bit program. This may prove to be a problem further down the line as I read that as the 'puter manufacturers go away from Intel chips to ARM then much legacy software is going to fail. Makes me wonder whether there's a DLL that can't be accessed from that location any more. It worries me that the 16 bit program that I use is going to finally fail after a mere 26 years! 
 
I doubt that Windows usage has fallen away, somehow, we've recently had a bunch working on Windows lappies in Ireland. What's more likely is that they don't upgrade that often. This machine, which in my defence rarely gets used for survey matters, has version 1.2.44 installed ... EEK!!! It still works, mind. The version of Windows on here is Windows 11 Home 23H2, same as on t'other machine, so if I'm right then it's a DLL that's different between these two sets of circumstances.

More later when I've had a chance to delve.

Graham

-----Original Message-----
From: Survex <survex-bounces at survex.com> On Behalf Of Olly Betts
Sent: 09 October 2024 20:01
To: Graham Mullan <graham.mullan at coly.org.uk>
Cc: Survex Group (survex at survex.com) <survex at survex.com>
Subject: Re: Error 0xc0000142

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

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