Other registered versions of a dll

[grahamk]

Hi,

I am a newbie to this forum. It looks like it could be a good place for me to hang out at. Thanks for running it.

I have an issue with registering an ActiveX dll I have written. I have compiled the dll plenty of times, and had to break binary compatibility a few times. I use a gui tool (http://www.sharewareconnection.com/e...r-dll-tool.htm) to register my dlls. It just sits over regsvr32, and is point and click and pretty. When I go to register the dll it claims success, but then the display reports that the dll is not registered. It listed a pile of other versions, which don't exist. The dll works fine, but it bugs me that it is being misreported. Obviously there are incorrect references to the dll in the registry (XP). I have run regcleaner4.3 (http://majorgeeks.com/download460.html), and it doesn't find an issue. I tried renaming the dll then and running the registry cleaner, and it cleaned out all but 1 other reference. I don't want to play around manually with regedit. Any ideas?

Thanks.

[Hack]

Perhaps it is this gui thing you are using that is causing the problem.

Do you have the same issues when using regsvr32?

[grahamk]

Thanks for your response.

I just ran regsvr32, and get no reported error. I get the same messagebox reporting success from the commandline and the gui. Makes sense, since the gui just makes the same call. The gui has a properties window that displays all the info on the dll. It is here that the other version is being shown. The dll is obviously registered, as it works. It also breaks when you unregister it, so it isn't seeing another version. I just hate having bad entries in my registry, and I hate them even more when they are from my code. It is just an obsessive need to clean these things up.

I haven't been able to find detailed enough info on the registration process to work out how to clean it up. Maybe I need to look harder.

Thanks again.

[si_the_geek]

If you compile the "break compatibility" version to the same file as the only copy of the old version, you should ideally un-register (and then delete) the old version before compiling - as that will remove the registry info. The alternative is to compile to a separate file (perhaps in a different folder) so that you can un-register the old one later (and still use it in the mean time).

As you have missed the unregistering step at some point, the registry info is still there... and unfortunately cleaner programs generally aren't particularly good. I can't remember what steps you need to take to remove it properly, but am fairly sure that there are about 3 of them.

[grahamk]

Yeh, I had a real mongrel of a problem talking to a weather station via RS232. It turned out that the weather station was failing, and my error handling wasn't strong enough. One of those "run for 5-30 hours then crash" type of issues. Event driven real time programming bends my head in funny ways. It wouldn't surprise me if I have forgotten to unregister the dll before recompiling in my despair and frustration.

Now the trick is to figure out what the 3 steps are.