Date: Sun, 2 Nov 1997 20:32:39 -0800 (PST)
Message-Id: <199711030432.UAA13725@adit.ap.net>
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To: ao950 AT FreeNet DOT Carleton DOT CA (Paul Derbyshire), djgpp AT delorie DOT com
From: Nate Eldredge <eldredge AT ap DOT net>
Subject: Re: Win95 weirdness (was Re: Configuring perl5004 problem)
Precedence: bulk

At 06:51  10/31/1997 GMT, Paul Derbyshire wrote:
>
>
>
>Anyone else notice Win95 (and win3.1 was even WORSE for this) sometimes
>generates protection fault messages or no apparent reason from things that
>are either perfectly valid, or were perfectly valid and ostensibly haven't
>changed? I quit writing windows apps because (whether I used VB,
>Smalltalk, or whatnot) Windows apps can work fine, and then one change
>which is still valid code with valid pointer/memory use, and it can
>suddenly generate GPFs; and since nothing is actually wrong with the code
>that you can find, and the bug seems to have somehow been compiled in in
>some irrevocable way, that entire copy is lost and you'd better have a
>backup...this strange inconsistent and unreliable behavior drove me to
>abandon Windows development entirely.
>
>As an example of this I wrote a Windows app for browsing hypertext
>documentations. It worked fine. Then one day it GPFed on use, and has
>never worked since, without any major chang, and even after undoing the
>minor one. It was written in Smalltalk.
>
>And, one day, all of a sudden nytime I used "more" in a DOS box it caused
>a GPF on exit, after it was done "more"ing something and was about to
>return to the prompt. I never changed anything about more, never
>bit-twiddled the EXE (or is it a .COM?) or anything. Windows just suddenly
>decided MORE was not allowed. Sheesh.
Is it at all possible that a virus or some other kind of corruption is going
on? I had a bad disk defragmenter put one-byte errors in all my files once,
and didn't notice it until all my Windows programs started bombing out.

Nate Eldredge
eldredge AT ap DOT net