PRB: General Protection Fault Occurs On VSS Launch

 Last reviewed: December 18, 1996
Article ID: Q159775
The information in this article applies to:
  • Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, 16-bit and 32-bit, for Windows, versions 4.0, 4.0a
  • Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, 32-bit, for Windows, version 5.0

SYMPTOMS

Under certain conditions, you may receive a General Protection Fault when attempting to open Visual SourceSafe. When running on Windows NT, this message may appear as: 

   The exception unknown software exception (0xc00000fd) occurred in the
   application at location <address>.

   Click OK to terminate the application
   Click on CANCEL to debug the application.
where <address> is any hexadecimal memory address.

When running on Windows 95, this message may appear as: 

   This program has performed and illegal operation
   and will be shut down.

   If the problem persists, contact the program vendor.

CAUSE

One possible cause of this error is if the SRCSAFE.INI file's #include statements are cyclical in nature.

In a typical client server SourceSafe installation, both the client and the server will have an SRCSAFE.INI file. The client's SRCSAFE.INI file usually contains a single #INCLUDE entry that points to the server's SRCSAFE.INI file. An example would be: 

   #INCLUDE \\Server\Share\VSS\srcsafe.ini
If a user or administrator inadvertently modifies or adds a #INCLUDE statement to one or more SRCSAFE.INI file(s) that result in a cyclic relationship, the above errors will occur.

RESOLUTION

Removing the cyclic #INCLUDE statements and replacing them with correctly formatted #INCLUDE statements will resolve this problem.

STATUS

Microsoft is researching this behavior and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.

MORE INFORMATION

Steps to Reproduce Behavior

  1. Install a Server installation of Visual SourceSafe.

  2. Open the SRCSAFE.INI file and add the following line to the beginning of the file:

    #INCLUDE <Path to SRCSAFE.INI>\SRCSAFE.INI

    where <Path to SRCSAFE.INI> is the path to the currently-opened SRCSAFE.INI file. Save and close the SRCSAFE.INI file.

  3. Attempt to run the Visual SourceSafe Explorer. Note that, depending on your current operating system, one of the two above error messages will occur.

KBCategory: kbprg kberrmsg
KBSubcategory: ssother
Additional reference words: 5.00 4.00 4.00a 3.00b kbdss



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Last reviewed: December 18, 1996
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