[GRASSLIST:4076] GRASS5.0pre3, windows XP and Blue Screen of Death

[Thomas Dewez]

Dear all,

After two weeks of troubleshooting constant crashes on windows XP
Professional revealed things that you may find interesting for further
reference. GRASS 5.0pre3 (precompiled for cygwin) and windows XP Pro may not
live together very happily and even produce the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).

The first error I had to figure out was:
INVALID_WORK_QUEUE_ITEM (error 0x96), this is an error of driver (so says
the microsoft online knowledge base).
I got this error when I was using the tcltkgrass interface.

Glynn Clements very kindly gave me this indication:
"Regardless of version, Cygwin's Tcl/Tk won't work for tcltkgrass or
NVIZ. You either need to obtain the package from the GRASS site, or
compile the Unix/X11 version of Tcl/Tk from source. In either case,
you need an X server."

The "wish" program of tcltk does not necessarily recycle its memory properly
and will die when it is completely filled up. There are two ways around this
problem. Either one can just run GRASS from the command line of cygwin (NOT
the command line of TWM). The alternative is obviously to install the
appropriate version of tcltk (I have not tried this yet).

When the driver error disappeared, my computer still kept crashing but this
time with a different error:
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (error 0xA), this is an error that comes up for
several reasons: hardware issues, sotware driver issues or antivirus
software issue.

In my particular case, I am running McAfee Virus Scan online. Just for trial
purposes I turned it off and ran GRASS from the cygwin interface. I came in
this morning and the DEM was interpolated... finally!!!

Has anybody experienced similar problems and found other causes?

Best,

Thomas