The case of sidebar.exe not starting. Oh Snap!

re: The case of sidebar.exe not starting. Oh Snap!

Gyula Chinoradszki — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:51:32 GMT

Solving a problem like this when you're able to reproduce it is really simple.

But what about my case? I'm a software developer and my company's product is widely used all around the world. Along development of course I also have to deal with maintenance tasks.

Recently we've received several crash dumps from the Windows Error Reporting service. These dumps showed our module crashing in the process initialization phase. We saw two kinds of exceptions: the STATUS_DLL_NOT_FOUND (0xc0000135) and the STATUS_DLL_INIT_FAILED (0xc0000142).

We're 100% sure which module wasn't found and which module's initialization failed in the other case. It was of course our DLL. But that's all we've got! Those crash dump files are hardly larger than 100kB. The call stack trace only shows calls in the ntdll module. We have absolutely nothing about how the crash could have happened, how we could reproduce it. (The only clue might be that the problem only came up on Vista (or above) and that in the case of the STATUS_DLL_NOT_FOUND an additional anti virus application's module were also loaded).

So my question is, how one could start the investigation in such cases? And how these exceptions can happen in the first place?

thanks in advance!

re: The case of sidebar.exe not starting. Oh Snap!

BooRadely — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:22:35 GMT

Probably want to use an IFEO for that and capture the failure of the executable to start, but this might be a little in depth depending on your level of debugging.

http://blogs.msdn.com/greggm/archive/2005/02/21/377663.aspx

re: The case of sidebar.exe not starting. Oh Snap!

sls — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:51:52 GMT

I have a similar problem. Had a virus on the computer & deleted some trojan virus named as dll's. Specifically, the system is looking for 'olmhojkz.dll' and 'dcjolkdk.dll'. Right now, I can't start any executables - they all fail silently. Can you please help? Thanks in advance!

re: The case of sidebar.exe not starting. Oh Snap!

mfa0007 — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 20:50:23 GMT

I figured it out. When I installed Photoshop CS, it had me run a different java dll, which broke the sidebar.

re: The case of sidebar.exe not starting. Oh Snap!

Michael — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 05:52:54 GMT

Help. I can start the siedbar, but all the geometries on the gadgets are broken - ie. every gadget has all the screen stuff in the upper right corner. It was working a few days ago, but now it has stopped. any thoughts?

The case of Windows Defender not starting.

Brad Rutkowski's Blog — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 05:03:09 GMT

Had a client whose machine would not load Windows Defender, each time it was opened it would eventually

Odds and Ends

roy ashbrook — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 05:10:15 GMT

Stuff I've been intending to post a meaningful post about, but haven't: If you have ever wondered

re: The case of sidebar.exe not starting. Oh Snap!

BooRadely — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 18:52:59 GMT

Join the club...

re: The case of sidebar.exe not starting. Oh Snap!

Nice — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:34:51 GMT

Brad Rutkowski you're my hero