From: r coyne (duckingsnofair@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jun 13 2002 - 18:49:22 EDT
I'm not sure whether I have one problem/bug or two, or
what component it's in, and I need some advice before
I can clarify what's happening; anyway, I need a
quick solution more than an eventual bugfix. So I
figure, let's try this list first, and maybe do a
formal Bug (or two) later if appropriate.
My situation: Someone sent me a couple of MS Word
files/documents that I need to edit. (Sorry, I don't
know what version of Word, only that WordPad can't
read them.) I don't have Word, nor enough use for it
long term to buy it, so I went looking for a free Word
clone, and found Abi. It looked good, and suitable,
so I downloaded it and installed it. This is AbiWord
1.0.2 with BiDi, the Windows Installer.
System: WinNT4 with SP6, installed clean on an old PC
I just bought second-hand. It's only 100/300 MHz, 64
MB RAM and 3 GB HD, but there's not much on it yet, so
no discernible cramping. Nothing on it that would
have any obvious interaction with Abi (except perhaps
in its Web features, which do not seem relevant -- I
have installed Mozilla as my default browser).
Installing Abi (the first time), I unchecked Update
Registry, both shortcuts, and Clipart, and for
safety's sake I chose to install as an unprivileged
user, in a deeply nested directory. With other
programs this has sometimes caused problems, but Abi
seemed to install perfectly and in fact behaved
impressively well -- just as an installer should.
Well, I ran Abi, and opened (File > Open) the first
document, and it opened, edited, and Save[d]As just
fine, no problems. I did this (so far as I recall) in
a single burst/window, so there were not a lot of
anythings open. So I Opened the second document --
and Abi immediately closed itself. I tried this
several times, always with the same result, and in the
one case when I had the other doc also open
underneath, it took that with it, too; in other words,
the close is of the whole application, not just the
window or document. At this point my list of files
included one with extension .CRASH , which I did not
look at, unfortunately, before deleting it, and no
other CRASH file has since been created -- Might this
have been Abi's emergency save of the *other* doc?
The problem document is longer than the other -- but
still not long, only maybe a dozen pages compared to
one -- and more complex, presumably with some
formatting codes that the one-pager doesn't use. But
I was also sent a hardcopy of it, and I don't see
anything really fancy, no tables or columns or
anything that couldn't be done easily with just lots
of fonts, sizes, etc. Except that it includes some
small pictures.
Imagining that that might be the problem, that Abi
couldn't deal with the images -- I have no idea of the
internal format for them --, and recalling that there
are lots of plugins available, some to handle images,
I went back to abisource and downloaded abiImageMagick
as looking the most relevant. And it seemed to
install OK; the installer found the main Abi directory
correctly, and I left it at that.
But then on starting up Abi itself again, a new
problem appeared. I got an alert: "AbiWord.exe -
Entry Point Not Found / The procedure entry point
?generateImage@FG_GraphicRaster@@UAEPAVGR_Image@@PAVGR_Graphics@@@Z
could not be located in the dynamic link library
AbiWord.exe". My first thought was that maybe the
Update Registry component really was needed to enable
the various items to find each other; so I reinstalled
Abi. (Now that I think of it, this process revealed
yet another bug, though only a slight one: When I
told it not to overwrite existing files, it hung, with
the display box looking as though it was doing the
installation *very* slowly, while in fact, as a look
at Details revealed, it had quit. A second try,
overwriting everything, succeeded.) This made no
difference. Next I guessed maybe abiMagick needed one
of those *other* image plugins to work with, so I
installed them, too (except GIMP, which is said to
need 128 MB for anything serious), causing no
additional problems but not affecting the existing
one. In doing this, I noticed that all those other
plugins offer an Uninstall, while Magick had not. And
a look thru Tools showed that while the others were
"active," Magick was not. So I tried to "uninstall"
it by hand, by renaming it so that the extension was
no longer .dll , and thus presumably making it
unfindable. But the entry-point problem/message
remains, which I find quite mysterious.
I returned to the (more critical) crash-on-open issue.
A Bugzilla check suggested that it might matter *how*
one opened the file: drag-and-drop might work where
File > Open didn't. I tried this. Dragging into the
Abi window/worksheet had exactly the same effect as
before, but dragging to the Abi Desktop icon (which I
had put there as a shortcut by DnDing the filename)
did a little better: I got: "Dr. Watson for
WindowsNT / An application error has occurred and an
application error log is being generated. /
AbiWord.exe". But the only action offered was Help,
and then that had problems owing to inability to
create a temp file. Eventually, somehow, I got out of
DrW Help the assertion that it first tries to put the
error log in the "Windows" folder -- I guess really
meaning winnt ? -- but if it can't do that it puts up
a file dialog to let the user choose another path.
But in reality, it doesn't. And there's no error log
I can find. And I'm sure not eager to allow all these
flaky programs full access to my whole system
drive/path. Can anyone tell me *exactly* what files
in what directories DrWatson needs to write, and
whether it will overwrite or append to an existing
(empty/blank) file with that name, so that I can allow
it access *only* as truly needed? If I could do that,
I could get more information out of this crash -- if
it's really needed at all.
Also -- back to the entry-point issue -- it occurs to
me that maybe the problem is that with everything
installed outside the usual path, maybe it's an
already-existing/system DLL that "can't be found";
though this seems very unlikely, as it would not
explain why the problem arose only upon installing
Magick. But since I don't understand this whole
thing, can someone tell me exactly what DLLs are
needed, and how/where Abi and Magick go about finding
them; in other words, where might it help to put
copies or links of them?
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