(Feedback) Access violation in RICHED20.DLL

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rue
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 1:54 am

(Feedback) Access violation in RICHED20.DLL

Post by rue »

I am using Notesbrowser 1.6.0.1 on Win XP pro. I was using the trial addition, but I don't think I was out of time yet. Notesbrowser no longer opens properly. Instead, I get an error that says

Access violation at address 74E6E98D in module
'RICHED20.DLL'. Write of address 00000000


Push OK, and Notesbrowser doesn't open a window, but
continues to run invisibly in the background and refuses
to close down when I close Windows down, it just hangs and
has to be forced to shut down.

This is what I have tried:
I tried uninstalling it from add remove programs,so I
could re-install it but it did not uninstall. I think it
may have been running in the background at the time.I did
not realize this. Now it is gone from addremove programs,
and there is no other uninstaller, but it is still
installed, and still won't run properly.

I have looked solutions up on the Internet. RICHED20.DLL
appears to be part of office,(a shared rich text editor
between Word, Outlook and Onenote and the solutions I've
found suggest that the dll may be corrupted.(did
Notesbrowser do that?) I have both office 10 and 11
versions of the dll and I don't know which is affected.
I have considered renaming the dll and then repairing
office, but I am not sure this won't make the situation
worse, or create other problems. Is this a common bug in
Notesbrowser, and is there an uninstaller available so I
can do a fresh install? What is Notesbrowser's
relationship to riched20.dll?
I have run recently updated virus and spyware scans and
have found no evidence that the dll file was damaged by a
virus.

What do you recommend? Do you have a solution for this?
I have some very important information stored in

Notesbrowser and I do'nt want to lose it.
Thanks
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Dirk Schwenke
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Posts: 116
Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2005 11:31 pm
Location: Hamburg
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Post by Dirk Schwenke »

Hello,
thank you for your detailed error report! Very good!

I will try to help you, but the answer will be very long because the problem is complicated (and mostly out of our hands!)

First, be sure to make a backup of your whole Notesbrowser folder so you can get back everything properly. All Notesbrowser files can be readed (nearly) in plain text with every common Texteditor like Notepad, so you will not loose information.

Some background information
It seams the RICHED20.DLL on your system is corrupted. Unfortunately Notesbrowser, like many many other programs uses the RichEdit DLL to display text. The reason is that it is fast, powerfull and works most of the time. One problem is that this DLL it is updated very often by MS and there can be compatibility problems. The other problem is that in the DLL or some version of it are quite a lot of bugs.

Mostly working solution
The first thing you should try is to replace this DLL. Be sure you replace all instances, because it can be multiple times on you computer. The version of RICHED20.DLL I on my WinXP Pro is 5.30.23.1221 - so please check which version you use.

Because you have XP, which Service Pack do you have installed? If not Windows Service Pack 2 - try to install this first.

Notesbrowser can not(!) corrupt any files, it only has access to files in its own installed directory. So another guess of me is that there could be a virus or malware on you computer which corrupted the DLL, but you have already checked this, you wrote.

Unistall Notesbrowser
To unistall Notesbrowser, there is no uninstaller needed, you can simply delete the files nb.exe and nb.dll and do a new install. The reason why Notesbrowser is running in the background at startup can be found here Start -> Programs -> Startup menu where Notesbrowser setup has made an entry. Delete this entry and Notesbrowser will not start again at startup.

Other considerations
In few cases it happened that the Richedit DLL is not the direct troublemaker (it has many bus, this is comonly known) but there is a problem with an single element in a text field of the last category that you have opened. We have had this problem before with OLE objects and corrupted images. For example you could have dragged and dropped such an OLE object into a Notesbrowser textfield and this caused the problems. The problem is not caused by Notesbrowser, but by the DLL which has problems with the OLE object.

What you have to do to find out if this is the case and remove the problem:


(Attention, this solution will only work with Notesbrowser 1.6 and Not(!) Notesbrowser1.7)

1) make the Backup!
2) exit Notesborwser or shut down the running process nb.exe if it does not close
3) open the file "User.xml" in the Notesbrowser folder with Notepad or other Texteditor
4) go to the <Columns> section
5) the value <userSelectedColumn> is between 1 and 3 and indicates the last selected column

This value is important to be sure which value to change:
if <userSelectedColumn> is 1 you have to edit <column1LastSelectedCategory>
if <userSelectedColumn> is 2 you have to edit <column2LastSelectedCategory>
if <userSelectedColumn> is 3 you have to edit <column3LastSelectedCategory>

6) edit the right value of for example <column1LastSelectedCategory> to a different(!) value than before, between 1 and 20. Fr example increase it by 1! This value is the category that Notesbrowser loads at startup!

7) Save the xml file
8 ) Open Notesbrowser again.
9) If Notesbrowser opens now without a problem, remember that the one category had a defect. Be sure you don't click on it.
10) to rescue the category that had made trouble you need to determine which category it was and to which file it belongs.
11) edit the category file with notepad, you will see that every field is saved and starts with something like {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg and ends with }
12) the first textfield begins with @@@END OF DESC@@@ and ends with ____1, the second begins with ____2 and ends with ____3 and so on.
13) the ____X are not part of the fields
14) You can see a mixture of plain text and RichText formattings but they can give you a guess what is written in the fields. If in the defect category is nothing interesting, I recommend to delete it at whole. Notesbrowser re-creates Categories that are deleted and they should be fine

14) If you want to rescue the Category, you have two choices: You can find out which textfield in the category makes the trouble. To do this, you need to replace all the suspicious fields in the textfile with no text, save the file and start to load the Category with Notesbrowser. The second possibility is you can try to get the information directly out of the textfields, but you will need to delete many RichText Formattings like \par \f0 but every text is still available. After that you should delete the Category. Notesbrowser will create it again, hopefully working.


I hope you can find the right solution from this many and provide us with informatios how you could solve it. If you need further assistance please write.

Best Regards,

Dirk Schwenke
rue
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed May 03, 2006 1:54 am

Post by rue »

Dear Mr. Schwenke: Thank you for your rapid response to my request for assistance. It will take me some time to work through your suggested solutions. I just want to add a few notes to your response for the record.
1. My startup folders are always empty. I don't allow anything to be in the startup folders.
2. I am running win xp sp 2
3. The problem with replacing the DLL file is that I have at least 3 instances and there is more than one version. ( I have two versions of 4 and one of 5 and it is hard to tell which is which. (This maybe is part of the problem.) I am not sure which version to replace. I have Office 2002, for xp (Office 10)but have also installed MS One Note which is an element of Office 2003 (Office 11) I am thinking that using the repair feature in Office might be the way to replace it but since MS help gives an abysmal description of what the repair function does, I am not sure that is what I want to do. I will check the ms knowledgebase again.
4. I will attempt your fixes and get back to you. Thanks for your help. Rue
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Dirk Schwenke
NB-Team
Posts: 116
Joined: Thu Dec 29, 2005 11:31 pm
Location: Hamburg
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Post by Dirk Schwenke »

Dear Rue,
I have some ideas about your comments:

1. Okay then it will not start at startup

2. Good

3. This can be the problem. I don't think mixed Office installations are a good idea, because they may share some resources which is not good if it are different versions. This is likely causing some troubles - you know MS, they don't expect you to mix Office installations, so it is maybe not tested.

Your idea about the Office repair feature is the same I have found in the MS knowledgebase. But the question is what it repairs and whether it destroys the other Office installation.

I think you are a experienced computer user so I think a good idea would be to determine the exact Richedit.dll used by Notesbrowser with a Dependency Walker. You can find it here:

http://www.dependencywalker.com/

If you use it on Notesbrowser (nb.exe) it will tell you which Dll on your computer is used and which version it is.

4. Thank you for you help, it can be of benefit to others!

Best Regards,
Dirk
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