situation:
- i tried to open wintab dll on my machine, but the application crashed
- i tried to open another dll, crashed as well (on openlibrary())
- on another machine, tried to open wintab, another crash
- it did work before, i changed nothing, i was baffled
- opening any 'automatically opened' dll's (such as kernel32) worked
after quite some time and a lot of stress i found out the following...
- on machine 1 there was a dll corrupted...
this one single dll that was corrupted (and which had nothing to do with wintab, not even usb related, and it shouldn't even be in use) caused *very* strange issues when opening up some other dll... it turned out to affect a number of dll's but not all (beats me why)
- replaced the dll, done
why didn't it work on the other machine then?
- not all dll's can be loaded when the hardware isn't attached!
this may sound logical, but i didn't think about it... i had been working on the capi2032.dll, which you can open without any hardware attached... wintab32.dll however returns a zero on opening... i was expecting an error when starting to use a function (like initializing) from wintab, not when just opening the dll...
well, the above is just for your information, so you don't have to feel stupid when you make some kind of mistake (no problem, inner
)symptom: can't open *any* (or simply many
) external dll