I never had any problem with Visual Assist X (VA) until recently. Oh, you don’t know what VA is? Check it out! This is probably the biggest improvement for any programmer using Visual Studio. I use it in Visual Studio 2003 through 2008 and I have also told some friends and colleagues about it. Most of them have been convinced and have this feeling of “this is like stoneage” or “this system feels naked” whenever they encounter a system without VA. And if you’re unsure, fetch the trial from their page and install it …
Oh yeah, back at the topic. Never had a problem until this week. My company had purchased yet another license for VA and suddenly it hung when I tried to install (doesn’t matter whether it had been registered before). The affected system is a Windows 2003 Server R2 (Standard) with all latest patches and service packs. Apart from that it has AQTime 5.4 and Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 installed. Now, I looked a bit what could be the reason for the hanging installation, but couldn’t come up with a solution. However, when contacting the VA support, I was pointed to this FAQ entry.
It turns out that the installer used for VA loads the DLL u3dapi10.dll dynamically (i.e. if it can find it somewhere in the DLL search path). If this succeeded, it gets at some point stuck during creation of a thread. In fact the thread never even runs, it’s really stuck during creation.
Attaching WinDbg brought to light that apart from two other locks, the questionable thread (the one trying to create the new one) holds the loader lock. So something must be wrong while loading this DLL or a dependency of it. Very ugly. However, to VA’s defense I have to say that the used installer system loading this DLL to support whatever U3 features is the culprit here.
The software which came with this DLL was CVSNT, or rather TortoiseCVS, which - in its newer releases - contains CVSNT by default. As a sidenote: the good people from Whole Tomato Software have not yet been able to reproduce the problem on their own machines. Any additional information or hints are surely appreciated by them.
// Oliver
no esta intalado en u3 en mi pen drive cruezer
Sorry, but I do not actually understand your language, but I think I gather the meaning regardless.
It is not important whether you have U3 installed or not, it’s part of CVSNT. In newer versions, I have seen that CVSNT offers the U3 support as an option now, so you can uncheck it and avoid this DLL from being loaded automatically.