I'm not sure whether I have one problem/bug or two, or what component it's in, and I need some advice before I can clarify what's happening; anyway, I need a quick solution more than an eventual bugfix. So I figure, let's try this list first, and maybe do a formal Bug (or two) later if appropriate.
My situation: Someone sent me a couple of MS Word files/documents that I need to edit. (Sorry, I don't know what version of Word, only that WordPad can't read them.) I don't have Word, nor enough use for it long term to buy it, so I went looking for a free Word clone, and found Abi. It looked good, and suitable, so I downloaded it and installed it. This is AbiWord 1.0.2 with BiDi, the Windows Installer. System: WinNT4 with SP6, installed clean on an old PC I just bought second-hand. It's only 100/300 MHz, 64 MB RAM and 3 GB HD, but there's not much on it yet, so no discernible cramping. Nothing on it that would have any obvious interaction with Abi (except perhaps in its Web features, which do not seem relevant -- I have installed Mozilla as my default browser). Installing Abi (the first time), I unchecked Update Registry, both shortcuts, and Clipart, and for safety's sake I chose to install as an unprivileged user, in a deeply nested directory. With other programs this has sometimes caused problems, but Abi seemed to install perfectly and in fact behaved impressively well -- just as an installer should. Well, I ran Abi, and opened (File > Open) the first document, and it opened, edited, and Save[d]As just fine, no problems. I did this (so far as I recall) in a single burst/window, so there were not a lot of anythings open. So I Opened the second document -- and Abi immediately closed itself. I tried this several times, always with the same result, and in the one case when I had the other doc also open underneath, it took that with it, too; in other words, the close is of the whole application, not just the window or document. At this point my list of files included one with extension .CRASH , which I did not look at, unfortunately, before deleting it, and no other CRASH file has since been created -- Might this have been Abi's emergency save of the *other* doc? The problem document is longer than the other -- but still not long, only maybe a dozen pages compared to one -- and more complex, presumably with some formatting codes that the one-pager doesn't use. But I was also sent a hardcopy of it, and I don't see anything really fancy, no tables or columns or anything that couldn't be done easily with just lots of fonts, sizes, etc. Except that it includes some small pictures. Imagining that that might be the problem, that Abi couldn't deal with the images -- I have no idea of the internal format for them --, and recalling that there are lots of plugins available, some to handle images, I went back to abisource and downloaded abiImageMagick as looking the most relevant. And it seemed to install OK; the installer found the main Abi directory correctly, and I left it at that. But then on starting up Abi itself again, a new problem appeared. I got an alert: "AbiWord.exe - Entry Point Not Found / The procedure entry point ?generateImage@FG_GraphicRaster@@UAEPAVGR_Image@@PAVGR_Graphics@@@Z could not be located in the dynamic link library AbiWord.exe". My first thought was that maybe the Update Registry component really was needed to enable the various items to find each other; so I reinstalled Abi. (Now that I think of it, this process revealed yet another bug, though only a slight one: When I told it not to overwrite existing files, it hung, with the display box looking as though it was doing the installation *very* slowly, while in fact, as a look at Details revealed, it had quit. A second try, overwriting everything, succeeded.) This made no difference. Next I guessed maybe abiMagick needed one of those *other* image plugins to work with, so I installed them, too (except GIMP, which is said to need 128 MB for anything serious), causing no additional problems but not affecting the existing one. In doing this, I noticed that all those other plugins offer an Uninstall, while Magick had not. And a look thru Tools showed that while the others were "active," Magick was not. So I tried to "uninstall" it by hand, by renaming it so that the extension was no longer .dll , and thus presumably making it unfindable. But the entry-point problem/message remains, which I find quite mysterious. I returned to the (more critical) crash-on-open issue. A Bugzilla check suggested that it might matter *how* one opened the file: drag-and-drop might work where File > Open didn't. I tried this. Dragging into the Abi window/worksheet had exactly the same effect as before, but dragging to the Abi Desktop icon (which I had put there as a shortcut by DnDing the filename) did a little better: I got: "Dr. Watson for WindowsNT / An application error has occurred and an application error log is being generated. / AbiWord.exe". But the only action offered was Help, and then that had problems owing to inability to create a temp file. Eventually, somehow, I got out of DrW Help the assertion that it first tries to put the error log in the "Windows" folder -- I guess really meaning winnt ? -- but if it can't do that it puts up a file dialog to let the user choose another path. But in reality, it doesn't. And there's no error log I can find. And I'm sure not eager to allow all these flaky programs full access to my whole system drive/path. Can anyone tell me *exactly* what files in what directories DrWatson needs to write, and whether it will overwrite or append to an existing (empty/blank) file with that name, so that I can allow it access *only* as truly needed? If I could do that, I could get more information out of this crash -- if it's really needed at all. Also -- back to the entry-point issue -- it occurs to me that maybe the problem is that with everything installed outside the usual path, maybe it's an already-existing/system DLL that "can't be found"; though this seems very unlikely, as it would not explain why the problem arose only upon installing Magick. But since I don't understand this whole thing, can someone tell me exactly what DLLs are needed, and how/where Abi and Magick go about finding them; in other words, where might it help to put copies or links of them? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com ----------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body.
