Standalone .exe not starting on some systems

General JUCE discussion
1

I am wondering how to troubleshoot the plugin not launching on some Windows systems.
Initially, I found that in standalone - double clicking does nothing, and neither does calling from the command line.

  • The same binary works on most systems.
  • A clean OS install seems to be more prone to this.
  • I run a DLL dependency checker and nothing seems to be missing.
  • When I launch a debug process from VS, it reports an unhandled exception from ntldll.dll

Exception thrown at 0x00007FFB932E8404 (ntdll.dll) in xxx.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x0000000000000000.

  • Looks like VST3 also does not launch on these systems, and does not pass DAW validation. Again, the same VST3 works fine on most Windows systems. Pluginval crashes:

*** FAILED: VALIDATION CRASHED

3: UnhandledExceptionFilter + 0x1e7
4: memset + 0x13b0
5: _C_specific_handler + 0x96
6: _chkstk + 0x11f
7: RtlRaiseException + 0x434
8: KiUserExceptionDispatcher + 0x2e
12: InitDll + 0xc475
14: GetPluginFactory + 0x703
25: BaseThreadInitThunk + 0x14
26: RtlUserThreadStart + 0x21

I appreciate any ideas on how to tackle this. Thanks!

2

The first thing to try would be to link the static runtime.
On behalf of a Microsoft advice the default was changed to dynamic runtime, which needs to be installed but often comes already from other programs.
You can switch in Projucer to static runtime, re-save the project and recompile.

3

Thanks, Daniel. I checked and we’re already doing that, so it might be something else.

4

This is telling you that the program is trying to dereference a null pointer. Look at the stack trace at the point of the crash, and you should get an idea where the null pointer came from.

5

Also, with VS it’s quite possible to debug a remote machine easily. Even in release if you have a PDB you can connect that machine and debug on your development machine.

6

Thanks for the tips, guys! I will keep digging.