Hey all!
Last night, I upgraded to SP2. Since then, random programs have been crashing saying "wininet.dll has performed an illegal operation". I click the okay button, restart the program, and everything continues to work fine. So far this happened to explorer.exe, msnmsgr.exe, and aim.exe all within a 10 minute span.
Please help an admin out :)
TIA, Dani
Dani,
Well, it might not be what you need, but there does seem to be a number of problems with SP2 that can be traced back to it's habit of defaulting to DEP being turned on by default. Look in the 'Things you should know before installing SP2' thread stickied up top of this forum, I posted a problem with DiVX and SP2, if you follow the link I put there, there is a link to a page that tells you how to disable DEP for now, and for lack of any better advice right off, I'd try disabling DEP right off, to see if it solves your problem.
Let me know how it goes, as I'm rather curious to see if this is the root of your problem, as it is the source of many others it seems.
Thanks! I'll take a look at that thread and I'll keep you posted. I actually have a DriveImage image of my drive from right before I installed SP2. So worst comes to worst, it will take 20 minutes to roll back to a clean, pre-SP2 machine.
Hopefully, you won't have to resort to that though. Keeping my fingers crossed here!
*update* Don't mean to bump this thread, but just to add that I checked the link to software that is incompatible with SP2 and I'm not using any of it. I am using McAfee however.
Understood, however this DEP thing has been causing headaches for lots of users from what I've been seeing, and since you started having problems right after installing XP SP2, and your problems are similar, I'd still recommend you try disabling DEP to see if that fixes it. You lose DEP's added security, (which is an unkown factor right now anyway, it's a great idea that so far only AMD's latest chips directly support), but you'll get to keep all the other security features of SP2 if disabling DEP works.
Feature disabled. So we shall see :-D
Can't wait to see the results, if any.
Here's something for you to play with, if this fixes it: There is another way to mess with DEP, I'll show you where to poke around.
Open Control Panel, pick Performance and Maintenance, pick System, pick Advanced, pick the Settings button on Performance, and you should find a new page for DEP where you can tell it what programs to protect. If you feel adventurous sometime, you could re-enable DEP, and go play around in there to see if you can include or exclude a program from being protected by DEP. You'd have to figure out a lot of it on your own though, since it is such a new feature, but there it is. ;)
That's the first such problem I've seen realated to core internet components, Dani, and the odd one out there is AIM.
How did you update? Auto update? Download the web install? I downloaded the full 270Mb package and installed from that, and haven't struck a single problem, but before trying it that way I'd be suspecting:
Browser extensions?
DEP as DuncanIdaho has suggested?
A sneaky bit of spyware that's got in?
Active desktop objects that are perhaps misbehaving?
wininet.dll should be clean and updated after a SP install, surely, so something must be playing silly buggers with it. Otherwise it'd have to be a botched Service Pack install.
Could also be an older driver lurking around in her system, as well, as that has been reported around the Net as being a fairly common problem with DEP/SP2.
Good thought, btw, on the Active Desktop objects.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=75&e=2&u=/nf/26344
evidently thre are huge conflicts with antivirus goodies.. ive heard its because
of microsofts own internal firewall and antivirus software bundled w/ SP2.
I wouldn't call them 'huge problems', Cain. There will be problems with NAV of course, as would be expected. NAV conflicts with EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE PLANET! But for the most part, the various 'conflicts' are simply applications which need to be set as exceptions to DEP, as has been stated.
The changes to the Internet Firewall are excellent, and I'm happy to see that the Firewall now works flawlessly in combination with my hardware firewall, where previously I needed to disable the internal one. There is NO antivirus software included in SP2, but there is a routine which checks to see if there is AV software installed on the system and in operation, and which warns you if there's not. It does not detect every AV profram in existence, and I've no doubt that programs it misses are also being touted as 'conflicts'.
It makes for popularity to slam Microsoft yet again, of course, and sensationalist journalism is currently running rife. Don't believe everything you hear ;)
Yeah, you've got the 'right' of it, as usual Catweazle.
Every major update I've ever seen to any OS leaves everyone scrambling to fix stuff...(remember Y2K?). It's not unusual, and I cannot understand why the press is making such a big deal over it this time. Perhaps it's just that more people, because of the prolific amount of Virii/malware/spyware/adware/trojans and the like, actually pay attention to it, which of course leads the media into a huge frenzy.
Two things I'd look at:
1. Firewall...if you have one it might not be playing right with some new networking function that has been implemented in SP2 and the end result is that you see the apps blowing up wininet.dll since the firewall is having issues with wininet attempting to perform functions it was not designed to handle. Just a theory.
2. IPv6...there was a post where a guy had this enabled and it was causing all sorts of madness on his system. He also had Zone Alarm which is always a likely culprit for this kind of issue.
Out of curiosity I'd like to know if you've got the Advanced Networking pack for XP or if you've enabled IPv6 on this machine...I haven't looked to see what SP2 is doing with regards to IPv6 but it would be something I'd look at. What firewall are you running? If it is Zone Alarm have you tried disabling the TrueVector service? Another thought would be you could install Internet Explorer 6.0 SP2 to get back to the previous version of Wininet.dll or try this update which should drop a different version of wininet.dll: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?amp;amp;displaylang=en&familyid=254EB128-5053-48A7-8526-BD38215C74B2&displaylang=en
I'm running IPv6 and SP2, no problems here, but that probably doesn't say a lot.
Another 'yay' for IPv6 and SP2 here ;)
DI, I think it does say something from a troubleshooting standpoint. You're right IPv6 should work with Service Pack 2. Also, the applications she is having problems with are all common applications...if everyone were having that problem we would have heard about it. That's why I think there's a third piece of this puzzle...I bet something to do with a firewall that's causing that particular module to blow up when these applications call it. I also remember some AV product, Symantec's I believe, dropped it's own version of wininet.dll...McAfee may do the same - possibly that has something to do with it.
You could well be right. It could be any of those things. Reason I'm pushing towards the DEP thing though is it seems to have cured a lot of other users machines.
There is also the point that I don't know what kind of machine Dani has, it may well have an AMD64 processor in it, for all I know, and if it did, DEP is a known problem with it and SP2 on a lot of machines. This could also be the 'third piece of the puzzle'.
I'm pretty anxious to find out if this did the trick, cause to be honest, I'm operating on a hunch here. (Some of my grandest successes were done following hunches, heheh!).
Purely speculatory from the bottom of the rumor mill catweasel.
CCSGAL,
Any word on this? I'm goin' nuts here, heheh. Did the fix work?
The same thing happened to me... random wininet.dll crashes running just about anything that uses the MS HTML control. I traced the problem back to a corrupted cache, probably a corrupted cache index.
I downloaded a program called "PurgeIE" that completely purges the cache and voila, no more problem. I used the "emergency" method described at http://www.purgeie.com/errcache.htm
(I have no connection with PurgeIE other than having downloaded the program and finding it worked.)
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