Another Fall Creators update problem?

Yesterday my system auto-updated to the Fall Creators Update (11709);
surprisingly everything ran OK and it seemed to be fine. Then an odd thing
happened this morning. When I tried to read Usenet messages I got a screen
popping up headed Exception Error 40tude Dialog. It contained a very
comprehensive, multiple tabbed list of system settings, and three options.

"Continue the application"
"Close the application"

and the weird one

"Report to Mantis Bugtracker."

All attempts to continue the program failed. Restrarting it did exactly the
same. Dialog showed errors saying it could not find various data files, and
the thread list was corrupted - it showed a few words, lots of space and
some odd symbols.

Thunderbird and Chrome continued to work so I tried to find out about
Mantis Bugtracker to see if it was some sort of malware - it's certainly
weird and hard to remove by all accounts, but doesn't appear to be a
virus/trojan. Assuming the Exception Error screen was produced by Windows
10 then, why would it send data to an obscure program like that? Anyone
know if it is a normal thing for Windows 10 to do?

Anyway, Bitdefender didn't show any viruses and I can't trace any other
malware. Windows Double Explorer would not run, throwing up the normal
small Windows error box saying Windows was looking for a reason for the
failure (it never finds one). So, having tried most things that I could
before making any changes, I restarted the system, which has run absolutely
fine ever since. Dialog and WDE run just fine.

So, an hour or so later, I know no more than when I started - except that
nothing like this ever happened with Windows 7 from its inception until now
and I'm more than ever convinced that I *HATE* Windows 10. However, that's
irrelevant - the question is has anyone seen any behaviour like this and
what causes it? Is there anything I can do to try to prevent it happening
again?


--
Bob
Tetbury, Gloucestershire, England

He is not drunk who, from the floor,
Can raise his glass and ask for more.

Bob Henson wrote:
Yesterday my system auto-updated to the Fall Creators Update (11709);
surprisingly everything ran OK and it seemed to be fine. Then an odd thing
happened this morning. When I tried to read Usenet messages I got a screen
popping up headed Exception Error 40tude Dialog. It contained a very
comprehensive, multiple tabbed list of system settings, and three options.

"Continue the application"
"Close the application"

and the weird one

"Report to Mantis Bugtracker."

All attempts to continue the program failed. Restrarting it did exactly the
same. Dialog showed errors saying it could not find various data files, and
the thread list was corrupted - it showed a few words, lots of space and
some odd symbols.

Thunderbird and Chrome continued to work so I tried to find out about
Mantis Bugtracker to see if it was some sort of malware - it's certainly
weird and hard to remove by all accounts, but doesn't appear to be a
virus/trojan. Assuming the Exception Error screen was produced by Windows
10 then, why would it send data to an obscure program like that? Anyone
know if it is a normal thing for Windows 10 to do?

Anyway, Bitdefender didn't show any viruses and I can't trace any other
malware. Windows Double Explorer would not run, throwing up the normal
small Windows error box saying Windows was looking for a reason for the
failure (it never finds one). So, having tried most things that I could
before making any changes, I restarted the system, which has run absolutely
fine ever since. Dialog and WDE run just fine.

So, an hour or so later, I know no more than when I started - except that
nothing like this ever happened with Windows 7 from its inception until now
and I'm more than ever convinced that I *HATE* Windows 10. However, that's
irrelevant - the question is has anyone seen any behaviour like this and
what causes it? Is there anything I can do to try to prevent it happening
again?

I think the "test team" at Microsoft must be on vacation this week.

If the OS had an actual chronological update log that
we could use, it might be possible to correlate your
observation, versus the date stamp on the various updates.

The problem is, the record of updates seems to vary from
machine to machine. Some people have driver updates recorded,
others don't. Some have feature updates logged, others don't.
The "History" in WU is absolutely useless now. You're better
off datamining the C: drive for file timestamps, to try and
figure stuff out.

*******

I had a weird one today. Firefox opened, and all the text was missing,
and the only characters in the dialogs looked like hyphen characters.
After a reboot, the problem was gone.

If I had to guess, it could be that the kernel font renderer
got patched or something. It can't be the video driver, because
there aren't supposed to be any new video card drivers for
my card (out of support).

I don't get too excited about transient bugs - because I
have to keep focused on whatever the hell I'm trying to
get done.

Paul

On Thu, 16 Nov 2017 09:58:39 +0000, Bob Henson wrote:

Yesterday my system auto-updated to the Fall Creators Update (11709);
surprisingly everything ran OK and it seemed to be fine. Then an odd thing
happened this morning. When I tried to read Usenet messages I got a screen
popping up headed Exception Error 40tude Dialog. It contained a very
comprehensive, multiple tabbed list of system settings, and three options.

"Continue the application"
"Close the application"

and the weird one

"Report to Mantis Bugtracker."


Mantis was 40tude Dialog's bug-tracking system.

40tude Dialog is no longer supported and Mantis is offline.

Mantis is mentioned in the Dialog FAQ at
http://dialog.datalist.org/faq/frequ...questions.html

You can see Mantis on the wayback machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030220...dialog/mantis/


All attempts to continue the program failed. Restrarting it did exactly the
same. Dialog showed errors saying it could not find various data files, and
the thread list was corrupted - it showed a few words, lots of space and
some odd symbols.


Try asking in the newsgroup news.software.readers -- with [Dialog] in
your subject line so the Dialog experts there will notice it.


Thunderbird and Chrome continued to work so I tried to find out about
Mantis Bugtracker to see if it was some sort of malware - it's certainly
weird and hard to remove by all accounts, but doesn't appear to be a
virus/trojan. Assuming the Exception Error screen was produced by Windows
10 then, why would it send data to an obscure program like that? Anyone
know if it is a normal thing for Windows 10 to do?

Anyway, Bitdefender didn't show any viruses and I can't trace any other
malware. Windows Double Explorer would not run, throwing up the normal
small Windows error box saying Windows was looking for a reason for the
failure (it never finds one). So, having tried most things that I could
before making any changes, I restarted the system, which has run absolutely
fine ever since. Dialog and WDE run just fine.

So, an hour or so later, I know no more than when I started - except that
nothing like this ever happened with Windows 7 from its inception until now
and I'm more than ever convinced that I *HATE* Windows 10. However, that's
irrelevant - the question is has anyone seen any behaviour like this and
what causes it? Is there anything I can do to try to prevent it happening
again?



--
Kind regards
Ralph
🦊

Paul wrote:

Bob Henson wrote:
Yesterday my system auto-updated to the Fall Creators Update (11709);
surprisingly everything ran OK and it seemed to be fine. Then an odd thing
happened this morning. When I tried to read Usenet messages I got a screen
popping up headed Exception Error 40tude Dialog. It contained a very
comprehensive, multiple tabbed list of system settings, and three options.

"Continue the application"
"Close the application"

and the weird one

"Report to Mantis Bugtracker."

All attempts to continue the program failed. Restrarting it did exactly the
same. Dialog showed errors saying it could not find various data files, and
the thread list was corrupted - it showed a few words, lots of space and
some odd symbols.

Thunderbird and Chrome continued to work so I tried to find out about
Mantis Bugtracker to see if it was some sort of malware - it's certainly
weird and hard to remove by all accounts, but doesn't appear to be a
virus/trojan. Assuming the Exception Error screen was produced by Windows
10 then, why would it send data to an obscure program like that? Anyone
know if it is a normal thing for Windows 10 to do?

Anyway, Bitdefender didn't show any viruses and I can't trace any other
malware. Windows Double Explorer would not run, throwing up the normal
small Windows error box saying Windows was looking for a reason for the
failure (it never finds one). So, having tried most things that I could
before making any changes, I restarted the system, which has run absolutely
fine ever since. Dialog and WDE run just fine.

So, an hour or so later, I know no more than when I started - except that
nothing like this ever happened with Windows 7 from its inception until now
and I'm more than ever convinced that I *HATE* Windows 10. However, that's
irrelevant - the question is has anyone seen any behaviour like this and
what causes it? Is there anything I can do to try to prevent it happening
again?

I think the "test team" at Microsoft must be on vacation this week.

If the OS had an actual chronological update log that
we could use, it might be possible to correlate your
observation, versus the date stamp on the various updates.

The problem is, the record of updates seems to vary from
machine to machine. Some people have driver updates recorded,
others don't. Some have feature updates logged, others don't.
The "History" in WU is absolutely useless now. You're better
off datamining the C: drive for file timestamps, to try and
figure stuff out.

*******

I had a weird one today. Firefox opened, and all the text was missing,
and the only characters in the dialogs looked like hyphen characters.
After a reboot, the problem was gone.

If I had to guess, it could be that the kernel font renderer
got patched or something. It can't be the video driver, because
there aren't supposed to be any new video card drivers for
my card (out of support).

Hmm, I wonder if something similar happened - the reason I say so is that
the time separator on the task bar since the Fall Creators update is a
square box instead of a full stop (period) - I did wonder if that was a
system font error. I'm not that technical - but it was certainly caused by
the update.

--
Bob
Tetbury, Gloucestershire, England

"I am" is the shortest English Sentence. "I do" gets you the longest.

Ralph Fox wrote:


Try asking in the newsgroup news.software.readers -- with [Dialog] in
your subject line so the Dialog experts there will notice it.

I'll do that - although the problem lies more with Windows 10 than Dialog
others may have had similar problems. Meantime, albeit I've temporarily got
Dialog back working, I guess it's back to Thunderbird for newsgoups.


--
Bob
Tetbury, Gloucestershire, England

Alimony - the Bounty on the Mutiny!