Windows program crashes as soon as you run it
There have been times where you will install a program, and it will work for days, weeks, without problems. The one day when you need to get into it, you get a pop up that says “A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.”
But how many times were you notified ever about a solution? And why would the application just stop working? You even tried reinstalling it, but NOT a single piece of luck in getting it to run again. The only thing you can think of changing is windows updates. And believe me, being in a corporate environment, I’ve seen windows updates break MANY pieces of applications, including the machine itself.
Here’s one thing you can try. Just recently I was running Crystal Reports XI on Windows Server 2008. Out of no where the application failed to start when I ran it. A little research and I found out that it was Microsoft Data Execution Prevention (DEP) that was crashing my application. What is it? It’s a security feature that was released in Windows XP SP2, preventing certain exploits.
Here’s an old excerpt from Microsoft.
“Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a set of hardware and software technologies that perform additional checks on memory to help prevent malicious code from running on a system. In Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, DEP is enforced by hardware and by software.
The primary benefit of DEP is to help prevent code execution from data pages. Typically, code is not executed from the default heap and the stack. Hardware-enforced DEP detects code that is running from these locations and raises an exception when execution occurs. Software-enforced DEP can help prevent malicious code from taking advantage of exception-handling mechanisms in Windows.”
Yes that is an old doc, but there is more detailed information on Wikipedia. This feature is in Windows Server 2003 SP1 and later, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008.
So how do you turn this off for a particular program?
1. Click start.
2. Click control panel.
3. Click system.
4. Click the advanced tab
5. Click settings in the performance section
6. Click the data execute tab.
7. Select turn on DEP for all programs and services except for those I select.
8. Click add.
9. Enter your application
10. Click ok.
And you should be set.
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