>Well, DCOM is activated in Win98 according to the registry. The explanation in the C++ debugger is this.
>
>Unhandled exception in .exe(VFP6R.dll) Access violation.
>
>Line in callstack:
>VFP6R! 0c0989a4()
>
>Disassembly:
>0C0989A4 mov byte ptr [edi+7EF0FFFFh],cl
>
>Quick Watch:
>CXX0013: Error: missing operator
>
>I find it hard to believe MS did not no about this prior to releasing version6.
>
>BTW, this does not occur when run as .app. So, what's new?
>

Apparently, no one is reading what I've posted - they stop reading when they see C0000005 FIX. The DCOM fix addresses one very narrow set of circumstances that cause a C0000005 error in the runtime environment where you are running an application that starts without the main VFP window visible (SCREEN=OFF in CONFIG.FPW, or similar), and then the VFP main window or a top-level form is made visible subsequently. If DCOM support has not been installed, at shutdown, the runtime program will terminate with a C000005 error. Installing DCOM support prevents that error from occuring.

There is no (0, nada, nil, none whatsoever) evidence that DCOM support is responsible for, or should be considered as a fix for, C0000005 errors in general. The error is an operating system level error indicating that there has been an address space access violation; lots of things can cause this. We've isolated one instance that plagued a number of people early on, and found a workaround for that case. Under no circumstance have you been lead to believe that DCOM is a universal fix for errors of this class. Careful analysis of the circumstances surrounding a repeatable error, especially when environmental considerations affect the repeatability of the error, is needed to come up with fixes for the problem. If you have a repeatable error, document the conditions of contest here and submit a bug report to the people at MS. We as developers don't have the source code to VFP6, can't write a service pack to fix it. If you document the conditions that cause it, we can try other environments to see if the error reproduces there, and if not, we may be able to suggest things as a workaround or a method to predict and avoid there error. You've provided none of the needed information, just I got another C0000005 error that DCOM doesn't fix. To me, that isn't terribly helpful.

The best fix I've found to date for debug and design time errors is to develop on WinNT. There are a number of things that have been reported as causing intermittent, or even consistantly repeatable, errors in the design and debug modes, that simply don't happen developing on a box running NT 4.0 with SP3 or SP4 and IE installed, with VS6 SP1 applied.

Sorry for this screed, but I'm tired of apologizing that the DCOM fix we've documented doesn't fix all known problems in all known environments where VFP6 is concerned...