VW 7.7.0 crash when opening file dialog on windows

Hi,

We very regularly have the problem that VW 7.7.0 crashes when we try to open the “Save as…” file dialog from the “File” menu in the VisualLauncher.

The error seems to occur when working with VW on a remote computer using “Remote Desktop Connection”. We use the native file dialogs.

This is the kind of message we get when VW crashes:

And this is the OS on which the remote computer is running:

                Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard

                Service Pack 1

It can be reproduced, if you are patient enough, by performing the steps described below. First of all it appears that the image is “more willing” to crash when you have an image that contains some open windows. What I did was to take a vanilla image, open 20 refactoring browsers and save it. From then on, the following scenario causes the crashes one time out of 10-50 attempts:

-          Open a remote desktop connection to a machine running “Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard” OS.

-          Start the vanilla image with 20 refactoring browsers open

-          Go to the visual launcher and try to do “Save as…”

-          This should open a save file dialog but every once in a while, it crashes the VM.

-          If the VM didn’t crash, simply quit the image and restart the procedure again

-          After enough repetitions you will get the crash

Depending on the conditions it can crash nearly every time you try do to “save as…” after working for a period of time. Some of our customers, that also work remotely, seem to have this crash fairly often: they also use this dialog and they say it makes the application crash about 50% of the time they use it! Luckily they don’t need it often, but when they need it they have to hold their breath and hope they survive.

Judging from the nature of the crash, it looks like some memory allocation issue that has to do with the file dialog data structures.

Does this problem sound familiar? And has it perhaps already been fixed?

Thanks in advance,

Mark