Access Violation

General comments and questions. Technical support.
patr
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Post by patr »

@admin:

I was able to install Atlantis on the flash drive, activate it, and import my saved Atlantis.ini and everything works well.

Of course, most of the time Atlantis does work well on my end. Until it doesn't.

EDIT: An additional note regarding possible corruptions of the .ini file and that line of thought: the times when the access violation errors occur when (merely) starting up Atlantis do NOT coincide with having made configuration changes. However, files and registry do get written to every start up and use of Atlantis, so read from and writing to files/registry does occur every time.
Robert
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Joined: Fri Aug 15, 2003 8:27 pm

Post by Robert »

To be able to fix any bug in any application, the developers must be able to reproduce the steps as described by end-users. Bugs that cannot be reproduced are quintessentially idiosyncratic. Your access violations won’t be stopped until the developers can reproduce them on their own system. Developers cannot fix bugs in a vacuum.
To me, uninstalling an application that has just been installed and customized is the opposite of constructive. Atlantis is meant to be used as a word processor to create documents. You are not testing the creation of documents in Atlantis, you are trying to catch Atlantis out through repeated and wild install, reinstall and uninstall. This is the opposite of constructive.

You assume that Atlantis includes programmatic errors regrading its uninstallation and you behave as if it was your assigned task to detect them. You "try to figure out why those access violation errors occur" but unfortunately you figured out nothing at all that would really help!
Most likely, these violation errors occur because of specific interactions between your system and the Atlantis uninstall. The developers could not even dream to be able to fix your problem unless and until they can reproduce these particular interactions on their own systems.

Now the INI file that you sent was merely a capture of your current Atlantis settings. That INI file won’t change until you overwrite it with a new version created from the "Tools |Options…" dialog. If it contains settings that don’t spawn access violation messages, you could rename it as "MyAtlantis.ini" and launch Atlantis through the following command-line:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Atlantis\awp.exe" /dss /lsi /sfn "C:\Users\<User’s Name>\Documents\Atlantis\MyAtlantis.ini"

This would launch Atlantis with the settings stored in your stable "MyAtlantis.ini" file, and tell Atlantis DontSaveSettings, LoadSettingsFromIni, SettingsFileName
In this way, Atlantis would read settings exclusively from your stable "MyAtlantis.ini" file.

If you want to make changes to these settings later on, make them in the Atlantis interface, and save the new settings as "MyAtlantis2.ini" file.
The above command-line would then become:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Atlantis\awp.exe" /dss /lsi /sfn "C:\Users\<User’s Name>\Documents\Atlantis\MyAtlantis2.ini"

If these new settings prove to be as stable, you could make them permanent.
patr
Posts: 75
Joined: Fri May 06, 2016 8:05 pm

Post by patr »

You assume that Atlantis includes programmatic errors regrading its uninstallation and you behave as if it was your assigned task to detect them. You "try to figure out why those access violation errors occur" but unfortunately you figured out nothing at all that would really help!
You are so incredibly off regarding the points I made in this thread that it is bordering on ridiculous.

How you think I "behave" is entirely ridiculous. I have documented what has happened to me in my use of Atlantis. How I then sought to reproduce and/or to remedy the issue, and I have further documented the various methods I've used to get back to being productive with an Atlantis that is erroring out.

Where you read that I'm behaving as a self-assigned bug-hunter is just, frankly, crazy. I'm trying to get to the bottom of the issue I'm repeatedly encountering on various systems and I'd like to do that with the developers who have insight derived from programming -- in that light I have tried everything that has been suggested and I have reported back. Exactly as one would.

Perhaps you should remove yourself from the discussion if you don't appreciate bug reporting and following up on admin suggestions. "Yeah sure Atlantis errors out on access violation at times, so what?" is not even remotely the attitude of one who would like to see a program improve or else understand what external process or state might be triggering the issue. All else is just your ego. You can recuse yourself from this thread at any time. You're only going in circles at this point.
patr
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Joined: Fri May 06, 2016 8:05 pm

Post by patr »

Now the INI file that you sent was merely a capture of your current Atlantis settings. That INI file won’t change until you overwrite it with a new version created from the "Tools |Options…" dialog.
What should be abundantly clear by now is that these errors seem to occur at random. The only changes would have been those Atlantis self-saves on every startup/exit and these are found in registry and such, not in the .ini file. I never claimed the latter. For example, runcount changes all the time and gets recorded in the registry. These would be among the type of "changes" that are the only thing I can see as occurring *as I didn't personally and expressly change program settings when these random-like errors occur.* I really hope you understand me this time. And please stop quoting me on things I never said!
patr
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Post by patr »

To be able to fix any bug in any application, the developers must be able to reproduce the steps as described by end-users. Bugs that cannot be reproduced are quintessentially idiosyncratic. Your access violations won’t be stopped until the developers can reproduce them on their own system. Developers cannot fix bugs in a vacuum.
Where do you get the idea that I expect developers to fix things they can't reproduce? Why would I share config files with them (upon their request) if I thought they could reproduce it without those files? Your attitude is basically such that people shouldn't report bugs and give feedback on their issues! "Your .ini file did not trigger the program crash" may just mean it's not the .ini file causing it. So what is? The issue occurs. It should not be reported now? I can't fathom your absurd attitude toward this whole matter. Frankly, it is absurd.
Robert
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Post by Robert »

There is no point in getting so peevish and personal, unjustifiably so to boot…

Just for the record, I have been involved daily in the development of Atlantis since it was first released many many years ago as "Atlantis 0.7", then as "Atlantis Ocean Mind", and now as "Atlantis Word Processor". I can rightfully claim to have helped fix an untold number of bugs which were present in the beta versions of Atlantis to which I have had regular access since its incipience. So I don’t see any reason why I should recuse myself from this thread. Or from any other thread for that matter…

You misunderstood what I said. Atlantis does self-save settings on every exit and these are normally saved to registry. But if you use the command-line I suggested above, nothing will be saved to the registry on exit, and the settings stored in your stable "MyAtlantis.ini" will be automatically used whenever you launch Atlantis. You'll then be able to use Atlantis as a stable word processor, and spare yourself a lot of aggravation…
patr
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Joined: Fri May 06, 2016 8:05 pm

Post by patr »

Let's be clear: you are the one that keeps jabbing in unjustified ways and insult a customer about their self-assigned bughunter status, etc. I never said or implied any of the things you keep bringing up and which I have all refuted successfully.

Like assuming that I had Atlantis running, when in fact I did not nor said I did, and to boot not understand that uninstalling Atlantis actually calls awp.exe into running. Things like this, time and time again.

So whether your sense of ownership is somehow affected by my bug report, I can't help that. If you want to ignore that this issue is occurring then that's up to you. I have complied with and responded to each suggestion as a constructive person would.

Your attitude has nothing but dented the good feeling I had associated with Atlantis for so long. I can say that. Your attitude is ridiculous. Appalling. Destructive. Not helpful.

It shouldn't throw an access violation error. I run various professional software and VMs and whatnot and none of the 200 programs I use ever has an issue. Only Atlantis.

I've had enough. I've reported the issue and gave plenty background information. Good luck!
patr
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Joined: Fri May 06, 2016 8:05 pm

Post by patr »

Don't read into me posting one more time, it's not what you think. I was actually uninstalling Atlantis and going back to TextMaker instead because I'm done with this sideshow.

Guess what happened when I uninstalled Atlantis just now? No really. Just guess.

Just to be overly clear yet again: no, no instance of Atlantis was running. But as I just mentioned twice, awp.exe gets called when you uninstall Atlantis and then this happened. The ini file was fine, right? You guys checked it out and it wasn't throwing errors while I was using it, this time (yet). No, I'm not implying it's caused by the .ini file or anything else. One has to be this disclaiming when someone willfully misinterprets you.

My experience here has been simply like this: being met with maximum prejudice and inexcusable ill will, and minimum inquisitiveness and good will.

To then do a final uninstall and get this... the cherry alright.
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Last edited by patr on Tue Sep 14, 2021 2:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Robert
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Post by Robert »

I run various professional software and VMs and whatnot and none of the 200 programs I use ever has an issue.
You’re trying to make out that Atlantis is the only program that has issues, especially issues that occur on your system. But no one else has reported any similar occurrences with Atlantis.
All programs have bugs and problems, even the best of them. For example, if you’d take a look at the MS office Community and Microsoft Word forums, you should notice how many problems users have had and still have with MS Word.
I've reported the issue and gave plenty background information.
Unfortunately, you gave nothing that could really help solve your problem… “awp.dat” had nothing to do with your problem, unless you tampered with it very unwisely.

Now I just changed the advanced file properties of "awp.exe" on my Windows 10 system. I asked Windows to compress its contents to spare disk space. This was obviously a silly thing to do, but I did it for test purposes. I then tried to uninstall Atlantis through the standard Windows procedure. I got this:

Image

Would you by any chance have altered the file properties of any of the Atlantis files in its home folder, especially those from "awp.exe"? Did you activate the Windows option to compress the Atlantis executable?

Would you by any chance have altered the file or folder properties of your hard disk so that Windows would compress their contents?

Just brainstorming!
patr
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Joined: Fri May 06, 2016 8:05 pm

Post by patr »

No, I do not have file compression on any of my installs or systems. And I doubt that file compression is the actual cause of the occurrence of that error on your end, either -- for this is how elusive it is acting every time... Coincidence does not equal cause. I'm very well aware of all such things, I just don't understand why I'm on trial to prove I'm not 7 years old if it weren't for your towering prejudices.

I never, ever, implied that awp.dat had anything to do with the error. What I said was that it was interesting that Atlantis would not successfully start up (not able to get beyond the error it threw) until I deleted that file (this of course only being one thing I tried and nothing definitive). Deleting that and other files was not a diagnosis of the problem, I was merely relating to you (or whoever) that *once* I deleted awp.dat, Atlantis started up again (albeit without activation). I only mentioned that in case this could give a hint where to look for the causes of this issue -- further, I even said it "may not be pertinent to the issue". I also never edited that file by any means. I have no idea why you keep misconstruing my words so blatantly. It is not hard to grasp what I meant.
Robert
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Joined: Fri Aug 15, 2003 8:27 pm

Post by Robert »

No, I do not have file compression on any of my installs or systems. And I doubt that file compression is the actual cause of the occurrence of that error on your end, either -- for this is how elusive it is acting every time... Coincidence does not equal cause.
I did test uninstalling Atlantis several times in the last few days. More than I have ever done, and probably will ever do. I never got access violations except when I had altered the file properties of "awp.exe" so that it was “compressed” by Windows to spare disk space. I repeatedly installed and uninstalled Atlantis with and without file compression of "awp.exe" several times. Access violations only happened when "awp.exe" was compressed by Windows.

As a rule-of-thumb, "correlation might not equal causation", but in my case, the cause of the access violations from Atlantis was definitely the compressed state of its executable. I never got access violations uninstalling Atlantis when "awp.exe" was in its original uncompressed state. There was nothing elusive about it at all! Nothing that could be misconstrued as "elusive"!
patr
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Post by patr »

I said it was elusive because the access violation both occurred during normal usage (as in, starting up Atlantis via its shortcut) -- as well as when uninstalling it -- but always quite unpredictably.

I imagine you can't reproduce that error each time, despite file compression being activated. It just happened *the first time you tested it that way.* Whenever the error occurs, there is nothing that occurred before it that stands out to me. No special activities, no changing of settings, etc. Hence, elusive to trace the possible cause of the error. If something is reproducible at any given time, then it is not elusive.

Do you have a good explanation for that access violation error? You can't have a good explanation because it shouldn't happen, not in any of the circumstances described. It is a shortcoming of Atlantis, not a feature. It is an indication of something going or being awry.
patr
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Post by patr »

I would recommend to debug the program, if you're capable. Look at what it points to when the error occurs and see if there is an issue in the code there.
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admin
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Post by admin »

We understand that you are getting errors in Atlantis, and we apologize for the inconvenience. But there is little we can do about things that are not reproducible on our systems. It would be possible to create a debug version of Atlantis that you could run on your system, but only in case when there is a reliable way to reproduce the error, on your system at least. We need to know what exactly to debug.

If your copy of Atlantis always reports the same error address (0067940B), it corresponds to a basic routine used by tons of modules and features of Atlantis. So in this particular case, the error address itself is not of much help.

As I understand, you have a portable copy of Atlantis on a USB stick. Does it work without errors?
Robert
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Post by Robert »

I imagine you can't reproduce that error each time, despite file compression being activated.
As I tried unsuccessfully to explain, these violation error messages are systematically displayed on my system each time I try to uninstall Atlantis and I have beforehand activated compression in the file properties of "awp.exe".
When compression is not included in the file properties of "awp.exe", I can uninstall Atlantis without a glitch. All this is as reproducible as possible.

Now a number of Atlantis users have reported problems regarding Atlantis which suddenly could not write to disk. In each case, the culprit turned out to be the antivirus application. This even happened on my system: AVAST had started considering "awp.exe" as RANSOMWARE, and was blocking any attempt I made to save modified documents. I have had to tell AVAST that Atlantis was in no case RANSOMWARE, and register it as a safe application with AVAST.

Could you please check if your antivirus application or security suite is not unduly “protecting” "awp.exe" or its home folder from write access? In which case, "awp.exe" could not be deleted on uninstall and the attempt would cause Atlantis to throw up an access violation message.
patr
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Post by patr »

I understand.

To be sure: I have master backups of Windows 7 (ESU) and 10 installs (Pro, LTSB, LTSC, etc -- I create updated Windows via sysprep, etc.) and restored to pristine states where the OS has not yet connected to the internet, nor any AV's have been installed. Only VC Runtimes, .NET framework where applicable, etc. And I have had these access violations regardless. I've also had them on at least 3 PCs with completely different setups and hardware sets, one of which is a performance laptop running Win10 Pro x64 which has a factory OS install (with restore partition). On the restores from master backups I have since done, I made sure to not even have addons or anything installed that might interfere -- I even used Autoruns to check if anything was being called or run that isn't part of the OS by default. These installs can't be more pristine or uncomplicated than this.

So to be sure, you are saying that since you enabled file compression, you can reproduce the access violation error *each time* you uninstall? Again, I've had file compression enabled on some installs years ago but never had any program error out on use or uninstall due to this. So why would Atlantis? Again, I've not used file compression in probably 10 years and not on even on my current hardwares let alone installs. I'd recommend debugging with file compression on, then, and see where that leads. If there is something in the code that is incompatible with that, it may also fix the other violations I experienced just starting Atlantis up via shortcut. Who knows?
Last edited by patr on Wed Sep 15, 2021 5:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
patr
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Post by patr »

admin wrote:As I understand, you have a portable copy of Atlantis on a USB stick. Does it work without errors?
I just installed the portable copy on the USB stick yesterday. To be sure, as I said before I can go weeks without an error and use Atlantis daily. (EDIT: I just checked and the Windows install I'm currently on is less than 2 weeks old.) Then, one day I start Atlantis via shortcut (not even via a document) and I get the access violation error. In the past I restored via .ini file, then I still got these errors again eventually (after some weeks) -- at that point I was getting frustrated and just started backing up all peripheral Atlantis files in ProgramData/AppData and packed this as a silent installer so I could double-click and restore to a working condition quickly. Then it was all fine again for some time and after an undetermined amount of time, the error again surfaced. This on various Windows installs, it was not bound to any particular install ever.

Which is to say, if I were to exclusively from now on use the USB stick to start Atlantis (not very convenient to say the least!) it may be weeks before it clunks out again. I can try only if that might tell you anything I haven't already shared or said. Are you thinking that if it fails, I can send you the entire portable Atlantis files so that you might be able to reproduce the problem?
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Post by admin »

As I understand, you get the error only at program launch.

If the error happens so rarely, tracking down the cause will be even harder.

I suppose, you can keep using your standard (non-portable) copy of Atlantis. If you get the error again, please make a screen capture of the entire Atlantis window (including the error dialog), and post it here.

Sorry for not being more helpful than that.
patr
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Post by patr »

As I understand, you get the error only at program launch.
It happens both at program launch, as well as at program uninstall.

When it occurs at program launch, it of course also happens if I then try to launch via an associated document.

I have not experienced an Atlantis AV error based purely on a corrupted document. Which is to say, it never happened that it errored out on a document but I was still able to launch Atlantis directly. So it was not ever a document issue.
I suppose, you can keep using your standard (non-portable) copy of Atlantis. If you get the error again, please make a screen capture of the entire Atlantis window (including the error dialog), and post it here. Sorry for not being more helpful than that.
I believe I did find that the AV error code during program launch might have been different than the one I received during program uninstallation -- but I'm not entirely sure.

I'll document whatever occurs in the future and let you know.


TO NOTE: Robert says he can reproduce the/a access violation at will when enabling OS file compression. So in that instance it is of course not hard to reproduce and I would think you'd want to look at that first at foremost. Correct?
Robert
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Post by Robert »

I did not enable “OS file compression”. I enabled file compression exclusively for “awp.exe”.

However, last night, my Windows system got automatically updated to the latest available build (19043.1237).

And uninstalling a compressed “awp.exe” executable now no longer produces access violations.

Problem solved as far as I am concerned! :)
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