OCX shenanigans

[Mark Carter]

Here's a curious statistic ...

I was putting together a little VB6 program. I had grid32.ocx on one
machine, but not on another. So I googled for "grid32.ocx download" and
came across
http://www.catalyst.com/download/support.html
I downloaded the grid32.ocx component.

I did md5sum on the component I downloaded, and a version that I had
from a VB6 install. And the md5's were different; meaning that they were
different files. Figuring that it might have something to do with
different versions of the same file, I found a little VB program to
display that information, which I found at:
http://www.codeguru.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-29422.html
The utility reported both OCX's at version 4.0.24.15.

So, what I'm saying is that both OCXs claim to be identical OCXs with
version numbers, and yet differ at the byte level. The implication being
that who knows what the hell is lurking inside components that you can
download from the internet.

 

[Al Klein]

Here's a curious statistic ...

I was putting together a little VB6 program. I had grid32.ocx on one
machine, but not on another. So I googled for "grid32.ocx download" and
came across
http://www.catalyst.com/download/support.html
I downloaded the grid32.ocx component.

I did md5sum on the component I downloaded, and a version that I had
from a VB6 install. And the md5's were different; meaning that they were
different files. Figuring that it might have something to do with
different versions of the same file, I found a little VB program to
display that information, which I found at:
http://www.codeguru.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-29422.html
The utility reported both OCX's at version 4.0.24.15.

So, what I'm saying is that both OCXs claim to be identical OCXs with
version numbers, and yet differ at the byte level. The implication being
that who knows what the hell is lurking inside components that you can
download from the internet.

Do a byte-by-byte comparison. It would be interesting to see if they
were really different, or if, perhaps, one just had junk tagged onto
the end of the file. Or they had different junk at their ends.

The question is - do they both run the same?