Created On:  06 April 2011

Problem:

An obscure error was encountered on a customer’s machine when attempting to open the Net Express IDE:

Error C0000005 Access Violation at 042FAE7B 01:00019E7B C:\\Program Files Micro Focus Net Express 5.1\\Base\\Bin\\mfio.dll

The IDE was not trying to load the last project at startup and there had previously been no issues with projects etc. Nothing seemed to point to why we were getting this error when simply attempting to open the IDE.

This happened with Net Express 5.1 on Windows 7, although we believe the same may have occurred on an XP machine.

Resolution:

We checked all system and user environment variable settings but nothing seemed obvious. After some discussion they said they had added some configuration options to their cobopt.cfg file, which was being pointed to by the COBCONFIG_ environment variable. This had been set in the ‘User’ environment variables in Windows – i.e. Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Environment Variables. They removed the last entry in the cobopt.cfg file and were able to start the IDE. So it seemed this could be the cause. They reinserted it and moved it to a different position in the file and they got the error again. But then they commented it out – and they still got the error. They then tried to isolate other settings that may have been causing the error, but none seemed obvious. So they commented them out one by one, but still could not isolate one specific setting. Eventually all were commented out, but they were still getting the error. They again deleted the last setting in the file, and even though it was different to the one they initially removed, and even though it had been commented out, the IDE started. Eventually we realized that it was not any specific setting causing the problem, but the number of lines in the cobopt.cfg file. In this instance if the file had more than 95 lines, including comments, they got the error when starting the IDE - but if it was 95 or less the IDE started fine. We’re not sure if/why 95 lines in cobopt.cfg is significant. But hopefully this may help should someone else encounter this, as this may be the cause.