Side-effects uninstalling eraser?

[Mitzl]

Hi there,

I ran into the following situation, you might be able to shed some light on. I am running Windows XP and recently installed eraser. After a while, as I found I did not use eraser that much, I decided to uninstall to free some space. Same day I tried to run Winamp (already installed) and surprisingly it didn't start. Some time later this turned out the same for QtCreator.

After some fiddling around I came around this post: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 90%29.aspx. In particular the piece on Potential run-time errors:

If a manifest is present in your application but a required Visual C++ library is not installed in the WinSxS folder, you may get one of the following error messages depending on the version of Windows on which you try to run your application: (1) The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). (2) This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling application may fix this problem. (3) The system cannot execute the specified program.

The last two messages are the exact messages I got.
Reinstalling the VC redistributable did not give any results (other from a slowly growing dispair :? ). Figuring from the post a not properly uninstalled library might be causing this, I decided to reinstall eraser, and voila: winamp and creator back to life.

Now for reproducing the error: uninstalled eraser again. Same effect, no response from winamp or creator. Reinstalling, back to life. For now I leave eraser installed until I have time to dig a little bit deeper. It might be some peculiarity of my machine configuration, but nevertheless, I hope you can share some insights on this.

Best regards,
Mitzl

 

[Joel]

Hi there,

I ran into the following situation, you might be able to shed some light on. I am running Windows XP and recently installed eraser. After a while, as I found I did not use eraser that much, I decided to uninstall to free some space. Same day I tried to run Winamp (already installed) and surprisingly it didn't start. Some time later this turned out the same for QtCreator.

After some fiddling around I came around this post: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 90%29.aspx. In particular the piece on Potential run-time errors:

If a manifest is present in your application but a required Visual C++ library is not installed in the WinSxS folder, you may get one of the following error messages depending on the version of Windows on which you try to run your application: (1) The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). (2) This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling application may fix this problem. (3) The system cannot execute the specified program.

The last two messages are the exact messages I got.

Let me start with background information.

Most programs on Windows depends on a set of DLLs called the C/C++ Runtime. These are provided by 2 files, msvcrtXX.dll and msvcprtXX.dll respectively, where XX is a two-digit number representing the version of Visual Studio it corresponds to. Eraser is not an exception, and we depend on the two files msvcrt90.dll, msvcprt90.dll and mfc90.dll.

With the introduction of the system-wide shared assembly cache (WinSxS) all runtimes where XX >= 80 can be installed there. Eraser does that by the "sanctioned" route; which is to install the runtimes through a Windows Installer merge module. The alternative route of doing so is to do a copy/paste by the installer into the folder, or using the Visual C++ runtime setup redistributable you found. The first method is the only endorsed method, for reasons you have seen on your system. From experience, many programs do the second and third deployment methods (or implement the third one wrongly). For as long as the applications are installed, the system hums along just fine.

However, uninstalling poses a problem. The runtimes are shared files and thus multiple programs depend on it. The reason why Microsoft insists on using the Merge Module is because multiple programs depend on the runtimes. Uninstalling one program which was installed by Windows Installer will allow the system to know if other programs are using the same DLLs; the other two methods do not allow this resulting in situations like yours.

Reinstalling the VC redistributable did not give any results (other from a slowly growing dispair :? ). Figuring from the post a not properly uninstalled library might be causing this, I decided to reinstall eraser, and voila: winamp and creator back to life.

Now for reproducing the error: uninstalled eraser again. Same effect, no response from winamp or creator. Reinstalling, back to life. For now I leave eraser installed until I have time to dig a little bit deeper. It might be some peculiarity of my machine configuration, but nevertheless, I hope you can share some insights on this.

You probably installed the wrong version. You need to install the correct architecture and the correct version. Eraser comes with VC Runtime 2008 SP1. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=a5c84275-3b97-4ab7-a40d-3802b2af5fc2. You may also need to run Windows Update to find the necssary patches (notably, the patch for the ATL security flaw last August)

 

[Mitzl]

Hi Joel,

Thanks for the explanation. Following your suggestions, it turned out installing the redistributable (ATL security update) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/d ... laylang=en solved my problem. I tried (almost) the same already, but indeed with an older version. Actually, after uninstalling the redistributable again, all programs kept on starting and running properly, so apparently the installing/uninstalling cycle of the redistributable got my system in a working state again.

Thanks again,
Mitzl