Re: [lmi] Alien msvc rtl dll messing with the fpu?

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 18:30:22 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:

GC> I just received a problem report indicating that the floating-point
GC> hardware control word is changed while lmi is running.

 And I guess we don't know when does it happen, right? To be honest I don't
know how could something like this be detected except by sprinking the code
with calls to _control87 and asserting (or logging?) if it changed.

GC> It's strikingly similar to this:
GC> 
GC>   http://community.borland.com/article/0,1410,17627,00.html

 This seems *very* old. I'm far from sure it has any relationship with the
problem at hand.

GC> In those days, calling LoadLibrary("commctrl.dll") on startup, then
GC> reinitializing the fpu, was a fairly effective safeguard. Later, I
GC> guess that became "comctl32.dll", but now I don't find either on my
GC> msw system.

 The "normal" comctl32.dll should still exist in your windows system32
directory. But it is not used with themes which are only implemented by
comctl32.dll version 6 which is "hidden" in
WinSxS\x86_Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls* subdirectory.

GC> I suspect that this stems from some process that lmi spawns for
GC> printing--adobe 'acrobat', perhaps, or apache 'fop', which is java
GC> and loads a jvm.

 I'm sorry, do you really mean that another process can change the FP
control word for lmi?? I admit that I didn't test it but I hope Windows
keeps separate FP control word for each process.

GC> I think it's still possible, though, for a completely separate
GC> process to cause this problem, probably by loading a copy of some
GC> redistributable msvc rtl dll. Do applications typically dump copies
GC> of such dlls into the system directory as they used to?

 Hopefully not.

GC> I guess I could enumerate all the 'msvcrt*.dll' files there and load
GC> them all

 The best would be to put a breakpoint on LoadLibraryW API call and check
the control word before and after it. Using something like Microsoft
detours library, it could even be done non interactivaly.

 Regards,
VZ