Elegant Simplicity

I had the need to view a DWG file, so I downloaded the latest version of AutoDesk DWG TrueView.  The installer went through its routine and copied a bunch of files, and plopped an icon on my desktop.  As usual, that was too easy.

I tried double-clicking the icon on the desktop.  No errors came up, but TrueView didn’t come up either.  It’s like I didn’t click the icon at all.  I tried double-clicking the DWG file, and received an error from Windows Explorer stating “Windows cannot find ‘…myfile.dwg’.  Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.”  Of course the file was there, I clicked on it.

I tried a few things and finally installed Process Monitor to see what was going on.  When I followed the DWGVIEWR.EXE process, I saw it do a whole bunch of things (1,623 events) successfully before the process exited with an error code -1073741819 (0xc0000005).  I did some digging and found the source of the problem: DEP.

It seems that DEP was causing the process to exit because it was preventing something inside TrueView from happening as expected.  The AutoDesk programmers didn’t trap this condition, so no error message was presented to the user.  Adding DWGVIEWR.EXE to the list of DEP exclusions worked perfectly.

I found this error code in a few other places as well: Java, Rosetta@home, and InstallShield.  I wonder if any of those problems were related to DEP as well?