Abnormal Program Terminations

[tompingel]

I have a fairly complex (24 interrelated files), bound solution distributed on both Macs and PCs in kiosk mode. One (and so far only one) PC implementation gets occasional, random 'Abnormal Program Terminations'. It's a Windows 98 application. The termination affects the files by destroying the font references assigned to displays. This customer is NOT happy.

On two occasions the termination allowed me to get 'details'. In both cases the dll referenced was fmtools.dll. In addition to losing font assignments, one other symptom of the failure is corruption of the 'wallpaper' the user has assigned to his desktop. It gets 'chopped' up.

Any clues or similar experiences? I'm going to suggest disabling the wallpaper, but there goes his vacation scene!

Thanks in advance

[DykstrL]

My experience with abnormal termination usually is due to one of 2 causes:

Number one would be lack of memory: If the user has any other applications running at the same time, it can cause this. Some applications such as Microsoft Exchange or Outlook - both of these are real memory hogs - they will use up any and all available memory below 64mb. High definition wallpaper does use up some RAM. If the machine has 64mb or less of RAM, the user may have to close all other programs to run the Kiosk solution.

The other problem could be the default printer: a corrupt printer driver can cause this. Or a network printer with more than 31 characters in the name, including the path.