CHM file causing application to crash

[TeSol]

Below are details of an issue that I am facing when the CHM file generated by Flare is used .

1. Press F1 from the Application . This opens up the Help File (CHM) . Read only the current page and close the CHM file .
All works fine
2. Press F1 from the Application . This opens up the Help File (CHM) . Now, navigate to different pages in the CHM file and then close the CHM file.
This throws the below error.

vshost32.exe has stopped working.
A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.


3. When the same thing is tried using the CHM file generated by HTML Help Workshop, it works fine.

Is there any difference in the CHM file generated by Flare and HTML Help Workshop? Any idea why this error is happening?

Thanks
TeSol

[RamonS]

Do you run the app from within VisualStudio? vshost32.exe is a VisualStudio process. Would suggest that it is the app that crashes rather than the help viewer. When you open the CHM and do not launch it from the app, does the same error occur?

[TeSol]

Yes , We get the error when trying to run the App from Visual Studio . The error doesn’t appear when trying to open the CHM file independently.
Interestingly, the error occurs only with the CHM file generated via Flare. The CHM file generated with HTML Workshop doesn’t cause any error.
Also note that when the App/exe is run in Compatibility mode (Windows XP), we don’t receive any error when using the CHM file generated by Flare and all works fine.

Are there any settings to be enabled when building the CHM file from the Flare Tool ?

Regards,
TeSol.

[RamonS]

From what Google tells me, the best thing is to find out why and where the app crashes. See http://www.codeproject.com/Questions/14 ... ed-working and in there try Solution 1 to debug the code. While there is a difference in CHMs I doubt that there is a systematic flaw in the Flare output. My guess is that the call to the CHM returns something that is not anticipated or something bad happens when the help is closed.
Is the released product to be run inside the VS IDE? If not, then make a build and try it on a brand new system (VM) to see if that causes the same error. If that works this issue morphs from a serious bug to an interesting to find out issue, which should be less of a concern. It may be an annoyance to the developers, which will be a good thing, because that provides more incentive for them to fix it. I haven't heard or seen anyone else reporting this and I am sure plenty of folks use Flare CHMs in VS projects. Which version of VisualStudio is this? Did you use the code modules provided by MadCap? Take a look in the help file, I think it has samples for the various programming languages.

[TeSol]

I've been working closely with Madcap Support regarding this issue. It has now been logged as a bug. I hope that it will be fixed in a future release.
Thanks to all who tried to help.

Best regards,
TeSol

[techwriter31]

Hi TeSol,

Were you able to resolve this issue? We've seen similar behavior, but don't get the vshost32.exe error specifically. Instead, after browsing the topics and closing the CHM file, the CHM sometimes hangs and then the software application crashes.

[TeSol]

Hello Kellie,

Yes, Madcap resolved this issue with a patch release for v7 and v8. You can probably check with them.

All the best.

[techwriter31]

Thanks! Bummer. Unfortunately, we've seen this problem with Flare 9.x.x. I will contact support.