Beige Bag Software

B2 Spice A/D v4 crashing problems

Symptoms:
Spice A/D v4 crashes when starting up, opening a circuit, printing, or at other odd times. The accompanying message would usually refer to a fault in MSVCRT.DLL and/or MFC42.DLL.

The crash happens with Windows versions 95, 98 and ME, but not Windows NT, 2000 PRO, or XP. Also, the default print driver has been the Acrobat PDFwriter, some HP print drivers (exact version unknown), NEC superscript 660 driver, some Lexmark print drivers (exact version unknown).

What we know about the problem:
We've been working with our customers and with Microsoft to solve this problem , and we have so far been able to reproduce the problem at our site only when printing to the Adobe PDFwriter print driver while running Windows 95 and Windows 98. There is no problem reported by Boundschecker (a top debugging tool), nor does Microsoft's C++ debugger help with any error statement that makes sense. Also, we have determined that when no printer interaction occurs in the program, the error does not occur. And several of our customers have eliminated the problem when either changing default printer before running the program, uninstalling their default printer driver, by updating the printer driver to the manufacturer's latest version, and or by changing their default printer driver to one that comes on the Microsoft Windows CD-ROM. For these reason, we have determined that there is a good possibility that the problem lies in some combination of Microsoft low-level code and the printer driver. Microsoft's technical support people have agreed with us that this is the case.

What you can do now:
Update to v4.1.2 if you haven't already. If you have and continue experiencing crashes, please contact us at info@beigebag.com for further instructions.

Also, you can try one of the following:
- change the default printer to another printer
- uninstall the current printer drivers
- install the most recent printer drivers (this seems to work best for HP printers).
- If a Windows 95 driver for your printer is available, use that driver instead.
- If your printer can emulate another printer, use the other printer's driver. For example, many Canon Bubble Jet printers have an Epson Printer emulation.