installation of zeus 3.96p - application cannot start

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Damodred
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:38 am

installation of zeus 3.96p - application cannot start

Post by Damodred »

Hello,

I downloaded and installed zeus 3.96p for evaluation of the software. I used the official download location (http://www.zeusedit.com/z300/ze32v396p.zip). After the installation I'm not able to start the software, zeus is complaining about an incorrect application configuration. I uninstalled the software and tried the installation a second time - with the same result. Just for information, the system I'm running is a Core Duo Notebook running XP Professional. Before Zeus was never installed on this system.

I hope someone is able to help me to get Zeus up and running :-)

Best regards,
Christian
Damodred
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:38 am

Post by Damodred »

I used the dependency walker to check if all dependencies of zeus are fulfilled. Doing this it got clear, that the msvcr dlls were not installed during the installation process but zeus depends on them.
After installing the visual c++ 2005 runtimes I was able to start Zeus. But as dependency walker shows, there is still a dwmapi.dll missing, I will check for that later.

Regards,
Christian
jussij
Site Admin
Posts: 2650
Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2004 5:10 pm

Post by jussij »

Hi Christian,
The msvcr dlls were not installed during the installation process but Zeus depends on them.
The Zeus installer has always has been designed to never install components to the system directory. I had personally seen too many installers accidentally corrupt system files, I was determined to never make Zeus into one such installer.

So for over 10 years the Zeus has managed to get away with this because the MSVCRT dlls where always installed.

I might be wrong, but I was under the impression these where System dll's, meaning they should already be installed and also get updated by Microsoft service packs. But since this is the second report for this issue, now I am not so sure that this is the case :?

What I suggested to the other Zeus user was that he tries re-installing the MSVC runtimes using this Microsoft installer and that seemed to work for him:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

But as I said to him, I'm really not sure why these system runtimes need to be re-installed, since this has never been the case in past 10+ years :?:

I will have to do some research into this and maybe I am wrong in thinking that these dll are system dlls, in which case the installer will need to be changed to shipped with these dlls :?

In any case, thank you for taking the time to posting this bug report ;)

Cheers Jussi
jussij
Site Admin
Posts: 2650
Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2004 5:10 pm

Post by jussij »

I might be wrong, but I was under the impression these where System dll's
Based on what is written about these dll’s on the Microsoft MSDN it does look like these files do need to be redistributed with Zeus :(

It looks like things changed with Microsoft's release of MSVC++ 2005: http://www.itwriting.com/blog/?postid=261

I will look to all these files to the next Zeus insaller release.

Cheers Jussi
Damodred
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:38 am

Post by Damodred »

Thank you for your prompt help with this issue.
It is really a mess of microsoft that such an important runtime library used by hundreds of applications is not installed by default.
Normally I would not have run into that problem because most times Visual Studio is installed on my pc's, this way all runtimes are also installed.

One solution would be to provide the user with a Readme or some other kind of installation note with a link to the necessary runtimes, but this is surely not very satisfying. For my part I like your approach, that the zeus installer only provides the core zeus files and not any other runtimes or other files. This way the installer is kept small and simple.

One other, different question. From some other text editors I know the following, very nice feature: The find/search dialog has a button/checkbox to allow the user to highlight all occurrences of the searched word/expression with a certain color.
Don't get me wrong here: the find function still only searches for the next occurence, but in addition all occurrences get highlighted in some flashy color.

Here an example for the feature I'm looking for:

Image.

In the example it was searched for "type 3". The first occurence that is the result of the find operation is shown in some kind of olive color, all other occurences are shown in a flashy green. This way one can easily detect further occurences of the search string when scrolling down the document....

Does Zeus provide this function? Or is this kind of feature already on your todo list/roadmap?

Best regards,
Christian
jussij
Site Admin
Posts: 2650
Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2004 5:10 pm

Post by jussij »

It is really a mess of microsoft that such an important runtime library used by hundreds of applications is not installed by default.

I am sure it was for earlier versions of Windows ;)

FYI, after your bug report I did some more reading into this problem and it turns out this issue has more todo with MSVC++ 2005 than anything else.

It is this version of the compiler introduced Microsoft's Side By Side (SxS) technology and it is this technology which has redefined how these dlls are to be installed. These (SxS) rules are very strict, so in a way I am very glad you found this bug :)
I like your approach, that the zeus installer only provides the core zeus files and not any other runtimes or other files.

The next installer will do exactly this ;)
Does Zeus provide this function? Or is this kind of feature already on your todo list/roadmap?

Unfortunately there is currently no way to do this in Zeus :(

But it is on the Zeus ever increasing todo list ;)

Cheers Jussi
Damodred
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:38 am

Post by Damodred »

Today I tried to install Zeus on another Machine, in this case a Core 2 Duo PC with 4gb Ram running windows xp. The c runtimes are installed on this machine. But I was again not able to start Zeus, this time because zeus crashes on startup. The windows error message box has the title "xToolTip: zeus.exe - Fehler in Anwendung" (I have a german windows xp...). It is the typical windows message box that you get if some application tries to write to some memory address but is not allowed to do so. Perhaps the mentioned memory addresses can help you: Command at address '0x004224e1 refers to memory address "0x7a240000"...

Any idea how this problem can be fixed?

Best regards,
Christian
jussij
Site Admin
Posts: 2650
Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2004 5:10 pm

Post by jussij »

Hi Christian,

Is the crash you see a Zeus crash (i.e. did you see the Zeus crash dialog) :?:

The Zeus crash dialog is the one that says "Zeus has detected and unexpected error...", but Zeus will continue to run even after the crash.

If this box gets displayed, with some luck there should also be a ZeusErr.log and ZeusErr.dmp file in the Zeus install directory.

If these files exist, could you forward them to me using the e-mail button at the bottom of this message, with a subject of Zeus Crash.

Cheers Jussi
Damodred
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:38 am

Post by Damodred »

Hi,

unfortunately the crash happens directly at startup so that zeus is never really started. So there are no ZeusErr.log and ZeusErr.dmp files in the install directory :(

The following picture shows the crash dialog that shows up when starting zeus (unfortunately in german..).

Image

If I push the Abbrechen (Abort) button, my Visual C++ Debugger starts up showing a message box that zeus had an unhandled exception:

Image

I fear that this is not enough information to trace/find the problem. One important information seems to be, that the problem seems to be related to xToolTip as the title of the first dialog shows.

Regards,
Christian
jussij
Site Admin
Posts: 2650
Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2004 5:10 pm

Post by jussij »

Hi Christian,

Thanks for posting these other details.

The crash is definitely very early on in the startup process which does make it very hard to locate :(

The only thing I can think of is this machine has some sort of system wide hook or application that is trying to injecting non-windows messages into the Zeus message queue :?

I have seen a similar problem with a Microsoft Language Support application designed to provided a special software keyboard for Asian languages. It would latch on to the Zeus windows classes in an effort to send special keyboard messages to Zeus.

Specifically it was using the user defined space of the Zeus window classes to do this. But unfortunately Zeus also uses this space, so when these messages where processed by Zeus the user defined data was meaningless to Zeus and resulted in a crash :(

If there is such a program running, try stopping it first before running Zeus. If this fixes the issue, post the name of the offending application and I will try to replicate the bug at this end ;)

Cheers Jussi
jussij
Site Admin
Posts: 2650
Joined: Fri Aug 13, 2004 5:10 pm

Post by jussij »

In the latest version of Zeus the way windows messages are processed has been change and this change may (or may not) fix this issue :?

In any case the installer for the latest version can be found here: http://www.zeusedit.com/z300/ze32v396r.zip

Cheers Jussi
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