Damn you DLL

They’re not dynamic. They don’t link, and don’t let you borrow any books. Yet Dynamic-Link Libraries (DLL for short) are out there, and they’re evil when they don’t work. Thankfully, most of the time they potter along doing exactly what they are supposed to; but when they fail, they tend to bring entire applications down like a crashing crashy thing.

That’s what has been happening to my usually rock solid stable DAZ Studio for the past week, and it’s all thanks to Microsoft’s implementation of version control across multiple versions of the same DLL – ie, there isn’t any. If one app happens to overwrite a DLL with an incompatible version with the same name, tough. And it’s a darned tricky thing to trace as all too often it’s not the DLL which causes the problem that’s the one shown in the error report (also another thing which Microsoft has sucked at, since ever).

Finally, I think I’ve traced the problem and one de-install of the offending app and re-install of DAZ Studio and I’m back to crash-free status once more.

I hope :D

Expect a very short Render Dump post this week folks.

5 Comments on “Damn you DLL”

  1. For what it’s worth, Vista and Windows 7 fixes your problem with fully implemented Windows Side By Side. XP / NT stuff has a half-assed implementation.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.