Two programs don't run but no errors either

[David Cook]

On my Win-XP system [patched thru SP2], I am having problems now
from two .EXE programs that do not run. Instead, they 'no-op'...i.e.
no GUI-based indication or feedback at all. No sign of errors either.

One such program is an old game...TAIPEI3.EXE. The other was
the installer for the AVG (free anti-virus software), which I recently
downloaded.

We can RULE OUT that the images themselves are flawed, because I
can copy this same game-file and the same AVG-kit to another Windows-XP
system, and they
both execute perfectly there.

It's almost like some underlying DLL or dependency is intervening to no-op
requested calls or to prematurely tell the images to exit with
success-status.

If it might be helpful, I've listed the files comprising the 'temp'
directory
as it appears after un-ZIPPING the kit. I've been careful to insure that
the 'temp' directory was entirely empty before unpacking the kit into it.

The 'temp' dir contains files:
01/26/1999 03:07 AM 437,528 40comupd.exe
11/16/1993 01:00 AM 21,008 ctl3d.dll
09/13/2004 09:17 PM 6,889,052 disk1.dat
11/25/1999 03:07 PM 108,691 install.exe
07/01/2002 04:51 PM 5,858 license.txt
09/03/2003 10:46 AM 1,507 readme.txt
02/26/2003 04:30 PM 180,976 setup.exe
09/01/2003 02:19 PM 22,130 setup.lng
05/25/2004 05:58 PM 69,120 setup32.dll
04/07/1999 07:24 PM 107,722 setwz.dl_
10 File(s) 7,843,592 bytes

Any ideas on what might be going on or other things to try?

TIA...

Dave

 

[David Cook]

I FINALLY resolved this problem. (Luckily, I tried using the
'DependencyWalker' utility (from SYSINTERNALS.COM) on the
two affected programs. That led me to understand that they were
BOTH old 16-bit-subsystem programs and that my 16-bit subsystem
had been BROKEN. Further debugging revealed that
the breakage was caused by the Avast anti-virus's installer. (Details of
that full scenario was posted in another msg-thread.)

Cheers...

Dave