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Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2007 09:08:47 -0700
From: Jim Kleckner <jek-cygwin2 AT kleckner DOT net>
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Subject: Re: Help needed with Big List of Dodgy Apps
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Dave Korn wrote:
>   These sorts of problems (cpu usage pegged at 100%, or mysterious hangs or fork failures) are often caused by buggy versions of antivirus, antispyware, personal firewall, or other similar security or system-related software that hooks into every running process and - because it doesn't hook in completely transparently - affects the behaviour of the operating system calls that cygwin relies on to work.
>
>   I'm adding code to cygcheck to detect whether any of the software that has been known at some time to cause these kinds of problems are installed on the target system being cygchecked.  The way it detects whether the software is there or not is by looking for keys in the registry, files and directories on disk, or running processes or loaded DLLs in memory, that would indicate that one of the problematic applications is installed.  But I can't do it all myself, because I don't have any access to most of the software that has been reported to cause problems in the past.
>   

Do you think a "tester" for API sanity is possible?
i.e. make some known good calls and assert their return values or some such.
Is there a common way that the badly designed hooking dlls cause problems
or is each one quite different?




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