OpenFileDialog crashes under Windows XP, but not Windows 7

I've got a strange problem I haven't seen before. I can open an OpenFileDialog in Windows 7 without any problems. However, when I try my app on Windows XP, calling OpenFileDialog.ShowDialog() immediately crashes the application. It just vanishes! When running from the debugger, I don't get any unhandled exceptions. If I wrap the code in a try/catch block, nothing gets caught. I have also checked all thrown exceptions in Debug -> Exceptions, but nothing pops up. I'll try som开发者_Python百科e of the other suggestions in the answers below and will report back.

Does anyone know how to resolve this problem? I found a post about something similar, but it was the opposite problem. I'll try tweaking the desktop settings to see if it's related to that, but I am dubious.

EDIT -- as a sanity check, I wrote a test WPF application that displays an OpenFileDialog directly via the main window as well as another Window that can be displayed by the main window. It totally works fine under Windows XP. So now I'm really confused. I have verified that I'm not doing something stupid like trying to display the dialog from a worker thread. The OpenFileDialog displays briefly, then disappears along with the application.

EDIT -- I'm going to try to reproduce this problem on another XP computer. For now, I'll try Windows XP mode and we'll see what happens.

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I got a similar error when a DLL crashes when I open a OpenFileDialog. It turned out that OpenFileDialog changed the working directory so my dll tried to write to a relative file that did not exist.

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Do you see any "First Chance" exceptions in the Output? Any entries in the event log? Does the default path you're using exist on the XP machine?

Try adding a handler to the App Domain's UnhandledException

Does the same happen when you use a brand new, stock FileOpenDialog without any tweaks? What about from a brand new app which does nothing but show a file open dialog?

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See Galet's post

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I cannot tell you what exactly the problem is, but here's what you could do to get a clue what's really happening. I assume you're using VS2008 or 2005.

1.Switch to release mode 2.Go to Debug\Exceptions, and mark all "Thrown" exceptions, like illustrated here: http://vvcap.net/db/JbWS_tzy2IpBoI7R7amm.htp 3.Run executable in debugger, ignore the warnings from VS that there's no debug info It does seem that there's a win32 exception thrown some time during execution, but this way or another, you will get one or more messages from debugger explaining what kind of exception happened and where. In most cases those messages make it pretty clear what exactly went wrong

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention is that unmanaged debugging must also be turned on, such like here (when you start program directly from IDE) or here (when you attach to running process) link|edit|flag edited Apr 12 '09 at 22:32

answered Apr 10 '09 at 19:01 galets 1,2201924