Dolphin revisions have instantly crashed on boot for about the past 5 years ntdll.dll

[Alexrose]

Hi there. I've been using dolphin since about 2005, but the past 5 years or so I've not really been able to use any version past 3.0-420-gbea635d

I get an instant crash whenever I boot.

If I boot, escape, boot, escape, boot escape 100s of times eventually I will be able to get it to stay up for 10 seconds and if I can do that I can quickly boot a game and then it won't crash. But I'm talking.. it literally takes 5 minutes of booting hundreds of times to not crash long enough to load a game.

Particularly, now that FM and Slippi have branched off a faulty verison, no mod of Dolphin will work for me at all, nor will the main version.

Sometimes it's StackHash_ded1

c0000374 (offset 00000000000bffc2)

When I debug in VS I get Unhandled Exception 0x76fcffc2 in Dolphin.exe 0xC0000374: A heap has been corrupted.

In the call stack ntdll.dll is throwing the error. (I don't know assembly and I think this is useless to you but it's 0000000076FCFFC2 jmp 0000000076FCFFC4)

I also get c0000005.

I have put this off for years because I've been googling, literally once every couple months for the past 5 years and I always land on "It's probably a faulty hardware configuration". It really isn't. Old builds were stable. I've been running this rig for 9 years. At this point I have completely swapped out the RAM, I've swapped out the GPU.

So the only possibility is that, i2500k, one of the most profilic CPUs of the early 2010s is incompatible with new dolphin, or I have some kind of software driver hell issue (I have reinstalled all my redistributables many times. In the past I realised at some point dolphin was hooking onto the wrong version of ntdll, one from program files from the Skype folder?!?! at this point I've wiped all versions of it that aren't in system32, syswow64 or winsxs. Maybe it's grabbing some broken one from my old winsxs amd folders or something?

I don't understand what on earth could be causing this issue. My CPU is extremely stable, I've not had BSOD in years, maybe 3 times ever in the past decade. And likewise, old dolphin works fine. But for netplay I need to use the ones that branch off new dolphin.

Is there any salvation?

[Helios]

Something is severely wrong with your windows install, but you've seem to have figured out that much.

You may try checking system integrity with 'sfc /scannow' but in my experience it rarely fixes system corruption issues.

Another possibility is that you have a service running on your PC that's intercepting Dolphin's execution and calls to various system libraries and fucking it up. The most common culprits are roughly in order, anti-malware suites, sandboxing software, some game overlays, and once in a blue moon, malware.

[mbc07]

Assuming you're running Windows 8 or newer, you can also try running the following command on an elevated command prompt:

Code:

dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

The command above verifies the integrity of system assemblies and tries to redownload a fresh copy from Windows Update of any corrupted assembly encountered...

[Alexrose]

(12-06-2019, 11:40 AM)Helios Wrote: Something is severely wrong with your windows install, but you've seem to have figured out that much.

You may try checking system integrity with 'sfc /scannow' but in my experience it rarely fixes system corruption issues.

Another possibility is that you have a service running on your PC that's intercepting Dolphin's execution and calls to various system libraries and fucking it up. The most common culprits are roughly in order, anti-malware suites, sandboxing software, some game overlays, and once in a blue moon, malware.

I don't think this is the case, I run a very lean number of processes. I don't have any overlay software, I don't even use Steam. The only thing I have running is Avast, tried disabling that and it does nothing.

It's not corruption, this has been an issue for absolutely years so obvs over a decade you're bound to sfc /scannow every now and then, I am positive this ssd is not corrupt, never have any other corruption problems.

I think it's a driver hell issue honestly. I've googled around this a lot over the years and it seemed people used to have the issue and it was never patched but hardware moved on. I think it may well be the drivers for the 2500k because I've seen other people talk about that?

Is there any kind of dump file I could give you that might shed more light on this? Sick of this happening and I really don't want to reinstall windows 7, and I definitely don't want to downgrade to 10. This is literally the singular program that doesn't work. I do everything on this machine from professional gamedev to video editing to music production with asio drivers to streaming, I pretty much cover all possible uses of a desktop computer and dolphin is the one thing that doesn't work, it's pretty frustrating.

Maybe I need to reinstall cpu drivers? I really don't know.

@mbc07: I'm on 7 pro 64 bit

[mbc07]

(12-09-2019, 11:55 AM)Alexrose Wrote: Is there any kind of dump file I could give you that might shed more light on this? Sick of this happening and I really don't want to reinstall windows 7, and I definitely don't want to downgrade to 10. This is literally the singular program that doesn't work. I do everything on this machine from professional gamedev to video editing to music production with asio drivers to streaming, I pretty much cover all possible uses of a desktop computer and dolphin is the one thing that doesn't work, it's pretty frustrating.

There's nothing to discover, your Windows install is simply borked. If this was something caused by Dolphin we would be getting a lot of complaints, but you're literally the first (and I guess the only) person having this issue. Reinstall Windows from zero (preferably not Windows 7 as its supports ends in about one month) and everything should work...

[Helios]

yeah you should really get off of Win7 soon as security updates end next month but I ain't your dad. do whatever you want.

Unfortunately you're probably not going to have a functional Dolphin install until you wipe your OS because it's pretty FUBAR if that error is being thrown.

[Shonumi]

I'll just throw it out there that you can install and use Windows 10 just fine without ever activating it. There are even ways to deal with the watermark on non-activated installations. Whether you pay or not for a license, there shouldn't be many barriers to getting an updated OS somehow. A clean install sounds like your best route too. Even failing that, there are Linux distros available. Dual-booting one is an option in case you really, really want to keep Windows 7.

[mbc07]

Windows 8.1 is also still an option if you hate Windows 10 so much...

[Alexrose]

(12-09-2019, 04:06 PM)mbc07 Wrote: There's nothing to discover, your Windows install is simply borked. If this was something caused by Dolphin we would be getting a lot of complaints, but you're literally the first (and I guess the only) person having this issue. Reinstall Windows from zero (preferably not Windows 7 as its supports ends in about one month) and everything should work...

That's not quite accurate, there were lots of the complaints after the dolphin commit broke back then. I've been following them for nearly a decade.

It has a bug report on mantis that continued to receive complaints for over 3 years and was never solved, it never got patched. People eventually just got new CPUs and the complaints stopped. You can see it here:
https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/4568

There's plenty of threads with it:

https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-crashes-upon-game-launch
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-crashes-when-i-play-some-games
https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-dolphin-keeps-crashing-w-direct3d
https://forums.intel.com/s/question/0D50P0000490Fq1SAE/application-crashes-due-to-heap-corruption-caused-by-intel-drivers?language=en_US

(About moving to Win10, this (my win7 desktop) is my ps4 development computer. I have a few copies of Win10 that Microsoft reps gave me, but I'm not moving to a less stable work environment - I already tried it on my laptop and the number of times I've been exhibiting a game abroad at PAX or TGS or whatever and my win10 machine suddenly updates mid show and breaks everything is ridiculous, I don't consider it a stable platform).

I understand if it's infinitely low priority to look into a problem that almost no one is encountering anymore, but if you know any hypothetical way whatsoever to solve this, or what specifically might be going wrong other than "generic heap error", it would be a godsend - every single version of Dolphin was completely stable until that one commit and unstable afterwards, and I can still run old dolphin perfectly well.

To you, I am the one guy with a messed up operating system installation. To me, Dolphin is the one program that doesn't work, and I use literally *everything* you could think of. Game engines, porting frameworks (PS neighborhood, nintendo ndi, xdev), trailer editing in premiere and afx, gaming, several DAWs, illustrator & photoshop, version control, matlab, 4 browsers, accountancy software, gif recording, VPNs, every messenger under the sun, emulators, Streamlabs OBS, my own software. Everything runs perfectly, and has done for a decade, dolphin is literally the 1 program that does not run, so to hear that my OS is inoperably unstable when it's only Dolphin (and only since a certain branch, I was using it for 5 years beforehand stably) that is unstable, just seems bizarre. I could uproot my entire dev environment and reinstall my entire OS and for all I know it just wouldn't work because dolphin might just be incompatible with the latest drivers for my CPU given the level of evidence I have now (which is just "your OS is broken reinstall" based on not even a dump).

Sorry btw if the tone of this post comes across as hostile, I'm not trying to be argumentative or cause a fight, I'm just not going to reinstall my entire OS just for 1 program that worked fine until a certain revision and would rather seek other options if they exist. Thanks for your patience.

[mbc07]

I'm not ruling out it might be something wrong with Dolphin, but keep in mind this is an open-source application and everyone who works on it is unpaid, people come and go frequently. Given nobody was interested on investigating this issue in the past 5 years and taking into account it only affects an OS which will be dead in less than a moth (whether you like it or not), the odds of a fix being made at this point are close to zero.

Somewhat unrelated but judging from your background, you might be able to get a license for Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC by talking with those Microsoft reps. It's a bare minimum, stable edition of Windows 10 (without Microsoft Store, Microsoft Edge, Cortana, Modern Apps, etc) that gets only security updates (optionally schedulable) and that will receive support until 2029. It's the closest you can get of Windows 7 but in an updated and still supported OS...