Yesterday the Clarion 6 IDE started crashing every time I opened it. More precisely, Windows would display the infamous “The Win 16 Subsystem has insufficient resources to continue running” error message.
Fantastic.
My first thought was to investigate printer drivers. That wasn’t the problem.
Then I rebooted. Repeatedly. That didn’t fix it either.
Then I swore. Twice. But that too failed to fix anything. I did feel a bit better though.
Then I turned to Google. I wonder if one day mankind will start worshiping and praying to Google? It does seem to answer our questions and solve our problems when all else fails. I wonder if Tom Cruise has considered this?? Anyway, I digress..
Google told me that this seems to be a known problem with numerous 16-bit programs, but there doesn’t seem to be an official solution. I tried various suggestions, and eventually restored “config.nt” from my Windows\Repair folder, to my Windows\System32 folder.
I rebooted once. Started Clarion. It croaked. I rebooted again. Started Clarion. And now it’s been running happily for almost 48 hours! Hmm.
I then compared the config.nt file that was in my System32 folder against the one in my Repair folder and found something interesting. The files were identical, except the “problem” file in my System32 folder had three additional bytes at the end, as follows..
For those not fluent in Hex, those three bytes are simply a space, followed by a carriage return / line feed.
I’m not saying that this is what caused the problem. But since I deleted those 3 bytes the problem seems to have gone away.
what the heck…? sometimes I can’t believe we are related – what language is this? (or maybe I am just THICK!!!)
Let’s not forget which of us has the BSc my sister
. Start speaking chemistry to me and I’m lost by word 5.
Can’t wait to see you guys in Joburg!
G.
Gary, have you seen this?
http://www.thechurchofgoogle.org/
Hi Mark.
Wow! No, I hadn’t seen that before.. Is that for real? I took a quick look and it sounds like they’re serious!?
G.
Here is my take on the 16bit subsystem:
I had been troubled for over a half year with the problem in XP where the
16bit subsystem problem crashes and a full reboot to recover the machine.
Typically I have been firing up the Clarion IDE in the morning and reboot
from 1 to 5 times during the next 12-16 hours.
I had been searching internet for a solution for months too, but only found
a lot of people reporting 16bit subsystem related problems, althought
different. All suggestions were dead ends in my case.
Then one beatiful day in march, Mark Sarson told me about something he’d found on the web: http://www.vttoth.com/wow32.htm
The above link explains as follows:
——–
In Windows XP and later versions (2003, etc.) the limit was extended to
65536 GDI objects per session.
This poses a serious problem for the Win16 subsystem, because, for some
reason, it always shifts the GDI handles to the right by two bits, when
converting them from 32 to 16 bits. This means that the actual handle cannot
be larger than 14 bits.
When the limit was updated for Windows XP, rather than eliminate this
bizarre shift to the right, Microsoft programmers decided to simply crash
the 16-bit application that happenes to be served a handle larger than 16384
by the GDI system.
We know this was a deliberate decision because of this error message, “The
Win 16 Subsystem has insufficent resources to continue running”, which
always accompanies this type of crash and nothing else (it is specific to
this type of crash), and is a new error message in Windows XP.
——–
Well, to cut it short, on march 23th I’d had enough of the 14bit subsystem
crap, and I decided to go for it, eg. to replace the original ms wow32.dll
with the hacked one. I could not see the wow32.dll mentioned in the
KnownDLLs list in registry, so I decided to ignore that part . Then I
used BarthPE ( http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ ) to boot the machine from CD,
and then just copied the file (I kept a backup of the original, just in case
At this moment, 4 weeks later, my XP pro has been running great since I did the swap. No problems, and esp. no sign of subsystem problems, which btw apparently is a full 16 bits now . The only sympthom I can see is on the Clarion splash windows, where the text strings have white blocks behind them, just cosmetics.
I cannot observe any harmful effect from this fix anyway.
So thanks again to Mark Sarson for spotting this cure. The least thing I
can do is to share this with others.
I really enjoy not having these crashes and to re-boot
Enjoy it you too!
Viggo Kleven
MediLink Software
Hi Viggo.
Thank you!!!!! And thanks to Mark!!!!
I’ll try it out this evening and will report back in a couple of days to let everyone know how it goes..
Best Regards,
Gary.
Hi to all,
How my laptop die i buy new (Toshiba Tecra S5, Intel Core2Duo, XP).
My problems is similar execept from 10 time 6 time C6 crash on compile and 4 stop.
When i want to stop process system show that 16 bit system is…
After changing wow32.dll he dont show error only every time crash.
I try to turn off the second processor, i try with Vista (Lap came with both os) and its same.
Any idea?
Thk,
Mld
Hi Mld.
I just bought a Core2 Duo a couple days ago, but it seems to be working fine. I’d suggest posting a question on the comp.lang.clarion newsgroups and seeing if anyone else has had this problem.
Let me know how it goes..
Good luck.
Gary.
I’ve used many 16-bit programs for years on XP with no problems. Then I tried to install SP3. What was I thinking? After hours passed, I was informed that SP3 could not install and that Windows might be unstable. Thanks a lot Ballmer. Thereafter Firefox and T bird crashed at will and 16-bit stuff lasted for about an hour before “insufficient resources” BS pops up.
After using the patch process at http://www.vttoth.com/wow32.htm, I just renamed the wow32-patched.dll to wow32.dll, booted to NTFS4DOS and copied it to %windir%\system32\ and %windir%\system32\dllcache\.
16-bit stuff seems faster and Mozilla stuff more stable. No thanks to the peddlers of Vista.
I’m looking forward to http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html