PB/DLL 6.0 Compiler Hangs in Window 2000

[Charley Carter]

Occasionally, the compiler hangs on my Windows 2000 system.
It happens both when I compile from the IDE and from the command
line. I have found that, if I use the Windows Task Manager to
kill the wowexec.exe process, I can recover. I can also
recover if I logoff and logon again or reboot. When I kill the
wowexec.exe process, it appears that the compiler has completed
and generated the exe or dll. I can recompile the same
source with no problems and no errors reported by the compiler.

I have noticed the same behavior on another Windows 2000 system
using PB/CC 2.0. I did not have this problem on Windows NT 4.0.

Has anyone else seen this? I think I saw a similiar post about
a year ago but could not find it again.

Thanks,
Charley

------------------

[Paul Noble]

Charley,

Yes, I've seen it under Win2000. It turned out to be down to having line lengths which
exceeded 255 (or was it 256 ?). This didn't always result in a hang / GPF -
only sometimes. I think this limit is documented..

The problem also occurred sometime later, when there wasn't a line of this length in the
file (or so I thought). It turned out I had unwittingly created a blank line above the
critical length. The editor was TextPad. How that happened I don't know - probably finger
trouble on my part.

Hope this helps -

Paul

[Guest]

I have encountered this also both from the command line (from UltraEdit) and from the IDE. I also kill it with the task manager and it works afterwards.

FWIW, I disabled write caching on my drives (which Microsoft apparently enables by default to enhance the speed illusion) and have not see this situation arise since (1 week). I don't have line lengths >= 255.

Ron

[Paul Warner]

I've also been having PB hang when compiling, but there is no
wowexec.exe to kill off. I kill the GUI and retry the compile
it just hangs again. The only way to fix the problem is to
logoff and log back in. Anyone found a fit!



------------------
Paul Warner

[Charley Carter]

Thanks for the replies and suggestions. I checked all of my
.bas files and none of them had lines with more than 100
characters. The longest line in the last one that I had hang
was only 85 characters.

I am testing disabling write caching on my hard disks to see if
that helps. Ron, do you have any information about why this
might help? I've only seen it hang once or twice a week so it
will take a while to see if this helps. (By the way, Win 2000
re-enables write caching on reboot. See Microsoft's web site.)

If you want to use "Task Manager" to kill wowexec.exe, you need
to select the "Processes" tab to find it. It appears below the
NTVDM.exe.

My guess is that MS changed something in the VDM that doesn't
always agree with the 16-bit code in the PB compiler. Hopefully
the folks at PB will make the compiler a 32-bit application in
the near future. My guess is that MS will only make things
worse for 16-bit apps in the future.

Charley

------------------