WaKan Project Website

[Dave]

I've just had to rebuild my home XP machine that had this problem and you might be interested in what I found.

After a fresh install of XP (SP1a) Wakan and the screen popup works fine. After installing SP2 problems start. With my machine before the reinstall, immediately after pressing the SC button the machine reboots. Now when I press it, if you left it alone it would probably keep on running for hours. But if you move the cursor over the Start button Windows will reboot. Also if click around Wakan after enabling the screen popup it will trigger something that makes the machine reboot as well. I'm not certain what it is.

I tried a couple of reformat/reinstalls and I got the same effect twice. I'm not too game for a third...

My machine specs here:
AMD 4000+
Abit NF4 mainboard
Elsa GF7800 GTX
SB Live!

[wakan]

Thank you very much for this pointer. Meanwhile I tested Wakan on several XP PCs and I have come to the same result: On XP SP2 Wakan SC tool always crashes, but no problems are on XP nonSP2 systems. Seems to me that SP2 have some security measure in them which consider Wakan's DLL hooking as malicious to the extent that it results in BSOD. I think I should release a version with SC disabled and meanwhile try to recompile Wakan with new release of the hook library, maybe it will be fixed by this.

[Dave]

Hi.

I think I might have found a workaround for the reboot problem with the screen popup. To me, it looks like it's triggering the Data Execution Protection thingy introduced into XP SP2. By disabling it on my home system, I'm now able to use the screen popup (yay!).

Here's Microsoft's article on how to do it.

For the short version:
1. Right click My Computer -> Properties
2. Advanced tab -> Startup and Recovery -> Settings
3. Click 'Edit'

The article says you need to do this step exactly. So be warned, you might damage your system doing this if something is typed incorrectly.

4. Find the line that has: "/NoExecute="

After that it will probably say something like "OptIn" or "OptOut", change it to "/NoExecute=AlwaysOff"

For example, my configuration looks like this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=AlwaysOff

If you have more than one WindowsXP installation, you should see more than one entry for Windows. In that case, you should know which one to change. :)

5. File -> Save. OK. OK. Reboot.

For what it's worth, it worked for me. For anyone desparate to get the Screen Popup going again, it's worth a shot.

Happy New Year everyone!

[Tom Hodgers]

Hi Dave.

Thanks for the great New Years Present.

Screen Pop-up now working perfectly on my XP SP2 machines (3). Also fixed the problem for other software with SP2 problems.

A happy and prosperous New Year to all.

Cheers,

Tom
_________________
Just another
和漢 WAKAN
若人 WHACKO DOing his thing

[wakan]

Oh great, thanks a lot, meanwhile I found out that new version of the "injection" library I use is available. I hope it will be SP2 compatible and that it will solve the problem and thus make this fix unnecessary, meanwhile, I'm really grateful for it, thanks.

[OCedHrt]

I really think the tool should be disabled when the program is running on SP2 with DEP enabled.

Detect through registry HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control => SystemStartOptions)

or

HKLM\SYSTEM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\AppCompatFlags\NoExecuteState


Another way will be to simply not query the programs that are windows programs or services when in OptIn mode and disabled for OptOut mode.

The weird thing is that it is the programs being probed that crash, not Wakan. So setting Wakan onto the compatibility list doesn't do anything.

[tgrand]

Hi. I was a bit shocked to see my system BSOD when I tried clicking on this button in the toolbar. I'm running a fairly recent installation of XP SP2 with a Core 2 Duo. DEP is enabled but for "essential Windows programs and services only", as is the default setting. dumpchk analysis of the minidump from my BSOD indicates csrss.exe as the probable source of the bugcheck, with the following parameters (these are from two separate crashes):
BugCheck F4, {3, 883e9020, 883e9194, 805d1140}
BugCheck F4, {3, 8a275da0, 8a275f14, 805d1140}

(Why two crashes? http://xkcd.com/c242.html)

So, if you're going to install hooks everywhere, how about avoiding system processes? I agree 100% with OCedHrt: How about disabling the SC function on SP2 with DEP enabled, or at least displaying a warning to the user? I feel Wakan offers some major value to students of Japanese but it's hard to recommend a program that knowingly causes BSODs on common configurations with no warning, just by having the user click a toolbar button in the main window. Granted, you did refer to SC in the help as experimental, but that doesn't quite go far enough.

BSOD = 気持ち悪い

[TurBoi]

First thank you so much cuz you made me see why problem occurs.
second:
i use a winxpsp2 but..at first it was working nice..after an upgrade it started no not work with pop-up tool.
i didn't have such crashes
pc didn't even get stalled
but screen pop-up window started to just not work out of taskbar except a few exception..i really got annoyed because i used to use this tool and it is very helpful for me ^^
i checked this topic and i see you offering to stop SCpop-up tool or win DEP
wakan without that tool is not enough and disabling DEP completely may cause a security issue (for some)..
instead of these, i added Wakan into DEP's exception list. and it works fineas been in past.


i didn't want to disable it but added wakan into list. it's ok
love be with you

My running pros.

[Tom Hodgers]

Hi all,

Similar to TurBoi, I had similar problems after upgrading to SP3 and installing some Microsoft updates last week.
However, including Wakan.exe into the DEP exclusion list did not function and Wakan and everything else froze-up when I pressed the screen pop-up button.
As I had been using Dave's workaround for the past two years without any problems I decided to use it again and disabled the DEP function.
Everything is now working perfectly once more.

Cheers,

Tom
_________________
Just another
和漢 WAKAN
若人 WHACKO DOing his thing

[islisis]

m$ windows = BSOD = 気持ち悪い

[wakan]