InDesign CS3 crashing on startup

Well, I finally fixed it. It comes down to an issue with Visual Studio: that programs built with it will not necessarily run on a target PC that doesn't have VS. You have to run a Microsoft file called vcredist.exe on the target PC, which provides it with the missing DLLs etc. We knew about that, but it turns out that when we decided to service pack VS2005, we should have downloaded a new version of Microsoft's redistributable program.

Why only this customer was affected remains a mystery. At a guess they have installed some other piece of software that included incompatible versions of some DLLs, and running Microsoft's installer fixed things as a side effect.

The crash I was getting on one of our own PCs a couple of days ago now looks like a completely different bug introduced by my diagnostic code. I'd investigate further except I'm already sick of this problem, and all I need to do is remove the diagnostics.

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

If you're getting it to crash then hook up the debugger remotely to the machine with the crash. I've had some fairly successful results debugging crashes on release builds. You have to set up you release build to generate debug info, but even then you don't have the same access to stack and global variables as you do on debug builds. Remote debugging has helped me greatly, I've even managed to debug across VPN onto a client machine. You need a friendly client and a telephone link while your working to avoid panic setting in.

Thanks for the ideas.

Our plug-in doesn't try accessing the network, so it's very unlikely to be a firewall problem. A DLL incompatibility does seem a possibility though.

I've had one major advance today. I altered the plug-in to generate log messages in every constructor I could lay my hands on. Nothing came out of it at the customer's site, but when I started it up here on a PC with the release version of InDesign, it crashed on startup. I am now thinking it's probably a memory corruption or uninitialised variable.

Charles

Charles,

What does your plug-in do? Does it do anything over the network? Could it be a firewall issue?

Cheers!

-- Jim

Charles:

If your plugin requires an additional dll and it has not been installed on the offending computer, it could cause a crash. I know, I know...way out there in left field, but its a possibility.

Jim

Thanks for your suggestions. I've now tried rebuilding the offending plug-in with a brand new id, but it made no difference. As for the version of CS3, the customer was on 5.0.3 and has since upgraded to 5.0.4. Again, no difference.

The search continues.

Charles

Hi Charles,

You may have thought of these things already, but...

One idea might be that the customer has a third-party plug-in installed on all of their machines that is conflicting, somehow, with yours. Since you don't have that plug-in, the problem doesn't happen on your machines. If they do have a third-party plug-in installed, maybe you could install that plug-in on one of your development systems and replicate the crash.

Another idea is to see if your customer has a copy of ID CS3 5.0.4 on which they can try to run your plug-in. Maybe the latest update will do the trick. Since the old "fix" had you rebuilding with the 5.0.1 SDK, maybe if you use the 5.0.4 SDK and the customer uses the 5.0.4 version of ID the problem will go away.

Good luck!

-- Jim