Delphi 2009 / Windows 7 / 64 bit Debugger Crash Workaround
Posted by Olaf Monien in Delphi, Development, tags: .net, CodeGear, debugger crash, Delphi, win 64, Windows 7Yesterday I revisited a nasty problem that occurs on Windows 64bit versions. I ran into that when I upgraded to Windows 7, but it seems it affects older 64bit editions of Windows as well.
After installing D2009 on a clean Win7 machine I was happy to see that Windows 7 really is what Vista should have been. It works snappy and has a lot of productivity features. But then when I started compiling and debugging a couple of my existing Delphi applications I experienced Debugger crashes almost everytime when I terminated an application.
Unfortunately no matter if you press “Yes” or “No” on that screen – you have to restart the whole Delphi IDE – which basically makes debugging impossible. In some (actually many) cases you even have to terminate Delphi using Windows TaskManager. I tried all of the compatibility settings Win7 offers, as well as running Delphi as Administrator – but no luck.
Some research on Google, QC and RAID showed that similar exceptions were reported with older Delphi versions, but apparently only on 64bit Windows editions. As the message already suggests, the problem appears to be an invalid call to a SetThreadContext API call. Some tests showed that you can easily reproduce this issue once you have more that just a single thread in your Delphi application. As you might know, I am doing quite a lot of Web application server development – which by nature create many threads…
I created a RAID entry for that (actually an existing one was updated with detailed reproduction steps – iirc) and joined a discussion thread on that topic to see if others are reporting that too. Because of time constraints I did not revisit that issue over the last couple of weeks, but yesterday when I was talking to Daniel Magin, we together found a solution someone had posted on a German Forum a few weeks ago. The original idea is from an MS TechNet posting though (credits go to a guy called Xelax Ax).
He posted a workaround that basically disables the check for a possible error returned by SetThreadContext, i.e. the debugger ignores the error and does not crash because of the Assert that checks fro no error returned. As Andreas Hausladen already correctly mentioned, this is really just kind of a weak workaround, because the debugger might misbehave after that and we just do not know why SetThreadContext fails at all. The point is though that with this fix I can work effectively again with D2009 on Win7/64bit and as this error only happens when the debugger is about to shout down anyway, so the danger of unwanted side effects is not too high imho.
Be careful! No waranties! I am not responsible for lost files etc.! Back up first!
Workaround steps:
- Close Delphi
- Locate bordbk120N.dll (C:\Program Files (x86)\CodeGear\RAD Studio\6.0\bin)
- Make a backup copy
- Check step 3
- Open bordbk120N.dll in a Hex editor (UltraEdit works fine)
- Search for “01 00 48 74 47 80 3D”
- Make sure this is found once only
- Replace “74” with “EB”
- Save
- Restart Delphi. Error should be gone.
This might work on older Delphi versions as well, but I did not test that yet.
Update 1
I talked to some CodeGear Q&A guy and he tested their current internal Weaver build under the conditions where D2009 fails. The good news is that the error seems to be gone there – so the next Delphi Version will probably be good. For those who want to get started now: please see Update 2 below.
Update 2
LordByte sent me his automatic patch tool for Delphi 2007 and Delphi 2009. Just click “Apply patch” and you are done.
Get the patcher here: Delphi_2007_2009_WOW64_Debugger_Fix.zip (169 KB)
Note: Provided as is for free. Use at your own risk.
Entries (RSS)
So who is in charge of this to fix this annoying bug? I don't think it's Microsoft actually – so I guess CG is responsible to hot fix this in their latest flagship D2009 (and hopefully not in an upcoming version)
Michael
CG will certainly say, that D2009 was released before Win7 and Win7 is not even officially released yet.
I talked to some Q&A guy of CodeGear, he checked that error on their current internal build, and the error does not seem to be reproducible anymore. So chance are that we might get an update somewhen.
One question here is certainly: what will be released earlier? Delphi next version (Weaver) or Win7?
[...] the blog site from my friend Olaf Monien you can find now a automatic path tool. it makes the changes for foru with one click. Possibly [...]
Interesting issue. If we look into the pseudo code of this function:
*(_DWORD *)(a1 + 3548) = 65551;
if ( SetThreadContext(*(HANDLE *)(v1 + 684), (const CONTEXT *)(a1 + 3548)) != 1 )
{
if ( byte_455BAC )
{
v8 = GetLastError();
v9 = (*(int (__cdecl **)(int))(*(_DWORD *)v1 + 132))(v1);
sub_401B08(“setContext osTId 0x%x failed %d”, v9, v8);
}
if ( “SetThreadContext failed” )
sub_40C6AC(“(!”SetThreadContext failed”)”, “..\win32src\thread32.cpp”, 434);
}
We can see that the Context flag is set to 65551 and if we look into the comments in the header file (winnt.h):
#define CONTEXT_AMD64 0×100000
#define CONTEXT_i386 0×00010000
…
#define CONTEXT_SEGMENTS (CONTEXT_i386 | 0x00000004L) // DS, ES, FS, GS
so all other flags are combines with either CONTEXT_AMD64 or CONTEXT_i386. It might be worth trying to patch this flag to the corresponding value for AMD64. If someone wants to try:
.text:0043C7F5 C7 83 DC 0D 00 00 0F 00 01 00 mov dword ptr [ebx+0DDCh], 1000Fh
Thanks a million, dude. From your information I have a created a fully automatic patcher. The patcher has been used by 8 colleagues (so far) of mine, and they all report success .. no more assertion errors.
Whohoo! Do you mind sharing that patcher? If you don't have a webspace, I can easily host it here on the blog.
Thanks for your comment – esp. for the highly interesting link about GetThreadConbtext on WOW64
Hi Olaf's
GREAT! GREAT! GREAT!!!
Thank you very muche for this solution!!
best Regards
I dont mind at all.
Please instruct me where to upload (FTP?), or give me an email adress I can send the attachment to
Best regards
Please send via e-mail to olaf (at) monien (dot) net
My mailbox has no size limit.
Regards,
Olaf
Regarding your last question: In this case I would prefer Win 7 to be released earlier. Let's see if the Delphi community has got enough power to 'force' CG to release a hot fix for this issue.
Michael
Mail on its way.
Hope it will solve the problem for all you guys.
Best regards
LordByte
Great – thanks! I have posted a link to the patcher under “Update 2″ above.
Will even update it for other versions of Delphi,
if anyone so desire. You must provide the
native BORDBGxxxN.dll for inspection, and the
BDS-basekey in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry-hive.
Anyway, I hope it works for all of you.
Best regards
Lordbyte
I don't have an x64 os so I can't try but you can also try to make the following change:
C7 83 DC 0D 00 00 0F 00 01 00 to C7 83 DC 0D 00 00 15 00 01 00
It changes the Context flag from 65551 (CONTEXT_FULL or CONTEXT_FLOATING_POINT) to 65557 (CONTEXT_ALL)
Have tested it .. Changed 0x0F to 0×15
Additional assertion errors not seen before occured.
Thanks a lot for your solution
With Love From Siberia
Sweet dude, the automatic patch tool works like a charm, I can finally debug again!
Hoo Haa!
Thanks a million Olaf and LordByte (Patcher worked on my Delphi 2007).
Not sure how much this affects older versions of Windows. I've been running Delphi 2009 under Vista 64 for almost a year now and never seen this problem once, even in multi-threaded apps.
thx alot for this solution!
This is new information for working job.
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Thanks! That did the trick with Delphi 2009 and Windows 7 for me (after I remembered to run it as an admin). There still seems to be a delay between closing the app and control returning to the IDE, but that's preferable to having to restart Delphi.
It would be nice if there was an official patch for this, short of Delphi 2010, since it wasn't that long ago that I upgraded to 2009.
Thanks guys,
This saved me a lot of time trying to figure out what is going on.
Patch program worked great on D2007.
Chris
THANK YOU VERY MUCH
Thanks guys,
I would never have been able to solve this one myself
Patch program worked great on D2007.
Thanks dude!
Hi, very interesting blog. Nice work!
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Hi, it’s a so nice and good site ever. It’s a really great and fantastic post here in this site. Thank you for the sharing of your ideas and information to all of us.mortgages.Thanks Regard.
Thanks guys! This really worked for me, great.
What about BDS 2006 which I must have running on Windows 7 in a few weeks from now when my boss, University of Oslo is going to abandon completely XP and Vista and all 32-bits computers. Just installing 64 bits Windows 7 in all computers.
Sounds like a “suicide” to me for those of us needed to support also old 2006 code with Ansi support for a long time still because of amount of code to change in order not to break binary streams.
Honestly, I didn't try BDS2006 on Windows 7. Maybe you should setup virtual machines (with XP) to run BDS2006.
Regards / Grüße,
Olaf Monien
——————————————
EDV-Beratung Monien
Embarcadero Technology Partner
Delphi Experts Chairman
http://www.delphiexperts.net
http://www.monien.net
Am 03.01.2010 um 18:28 schrieb Disqus:
Thanks alot for this!
Works for me too. (W7 x64)
Hi!
Just a quick verification: Can someone please verify that this problem does NOT occur anymore in Delphi 2010?
Thanks!
I have not seen that problem on my D2010/Win64 bit installation so far. IIRC it was marked as fixed in RAID.
Regards / Grüße,
Olaf Monien
——————————————
EDV-Beratung Monien
Embarcadero Technology Partner
Delphi Experts Chairman
http://www.delphiexperts.net
http://www.monien.net
Am 12.01.2010 um 09:34 schrieb Disqus:
Thanks VERY much for supplying this patch. Worked great for me with Delphi 2007 on Windows 7 to fix this annoying problem.
Thanks for sharing, i love this post
http://currnews.com/
currnews.com
Very much live news
Thank you very much.
I reinstall my C++Builder 2007 in a W7 x64 an get this error (not always, but frecuently).
I had edited bordbk120N.dll and now work ok. Great.
Best regards
Juan Manuel Marin
Thanks for the patch. it worked.
Thanks for that – takes the stress back out of my day. The auto-patcher worked beautifully once I woke up enough to remember to run it as admin on win7.
I have CB2007 installed on Win7 x64 and I don't have the bordbk120N.dll file but I do have bordbk105N.dll. Any ideas as I have the same error?
Solution, I edited it the same as bordbk120N.dll would need and it worked.
Your dll is definitely a different Version. I didn't touch C Builder
for while, so I don't have a sugestion right now. Sorry
–
Grüße / Regards,
Olaf Monien
Sent via iPhone
Am 12.03.2010 um 10:12 schrieb “Disqus” <
>:
Well I can confirm after using it all day that it works. If it help my CB2007 version is:
CodeGear™ C++Builder® 2007 R2 Version 11.0.2902.10471
Installed Updates:
December 2007 Update
May08 Help Update
Hi Olaf.
Thank you!
Thank you for the interesting article and LordByte for the patcher.
This bug was really annoying…
Great THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!++++++++
Thank you for the link to the patcher, and thanks to LordByte for the patch itself! I've been dealing with the issue for the past few weeks and finally thought I'd search for a fix. Great patcher, thanks!
Man you rocks.
The “update 2″ works perfectly.
Thanks very much your attention to share this.
Best Regards…
Great, thanks man.