Program won't open

[Jmacp]

This is a long shot could be a hundred things, but, the coding guys at myspace have made a new IM'enger, myspaceIM - written in c++, now a for a lot of people it will install ok but wont open when you try and run it - this happens for all OS's 98,ME,XP which is a bit weird as it also works for a lot of people, they are trying to fix it but dont know what the problem is, any idea what could be causing this?

I know its a long shot but just general - maybe someone has an idea. Registry etc...

[Al42]

With the information available, I think about the closest anyone here could come would be "something's broken". It could be just about anything except the About form (if there is one).

[iPrank]

but wont open when you try and run it

I may be wrong, but I think the program DOES run - as long as it has a valid PE header.

Something is causing the app to terminate unexpectedly - may be just after the entrypoint or may be somewhere later before displaying the window. Are you sure there is no unhandled exception ? Are you using any component that requires some other component to be installed ?

As Al42 said, it is almost impossible to guess the correct cause.

Tell your C++ programmers to maintain a VERY detailed log file of the software. Hopefully from the log file you'll know just when the app terminates.

If there is nothing in the log file, then, all I can say is, "compiler/linker is doing something bad".

[Jmacp]

is there any kind of progam that will let me debug it externally?

Like maybe something that will through up an error when run?

Iprank , your right it does load, had a look in process viewer but terminates almost right away, 99% of the problems are on win 98/ME OS's, in fact only one person with the prob says they are on win xp, which makes me doubt they even now if they are or not, it looks like a win 98/ME problem.

[CornedBee]

Perhaps you're using an API function not available on 9x? There are quite a few of them.

Grab the Dependency Viewer (it comes with Visual Studio) and look at all the functions you import from the various Windows DLLs, checking each for availability in older systems.
Your app being a network app, I would look at advanced networking functions first.

[Al42]

Quick and (very) dirty debug technique - pop a msgbox (with an incrementing number) at every single line of code. Then you'll know just how far the code ran, so you'll know which line (the next one) broke it. As I said, very dirty.

[Jmacp]

Perhaps you're using an API function not available on 9x? There are quite a few of them.

Grab the Dependency Viewer (it comes with Visual Studio) and look at all the functions you import from the various Windows DLLs, checking each for availability in older systems.
Your app being a network app, I would look at advanced networking functions first.

yup looks like your right D-W, shows missing dll's, so API that isn't available on win98/me, good job!

[CornedBee]

Quick and (very) dirty debug technique - pop a msgbox (with an incrementing number) at every single line of code. Then you'll know just how far the code ran, so you'll know which line (the next one) broke it. As I said, very dirty.

That works with test programs. For real applications, the possible paths are too diverse, and more importantly, there are simply too many instructions to click through all of them.