I have an old VB6 app which I’m still trying to support. A few users have reported weird crashes when running the app in Vista or Windows 7. The log files don’t show anything after one of these crashes, but the customers report that the error message said “OLE something …”, if they saw anything at all.
I’ve never been able to reproduce these crashes while running the program on my own Vista or Windows 7 boxes, so I have essentially no information on what the problem is.
My suspicion is that it’s a problem with their versions of one or more of the umpteen billion DLLs that a VB6 application is dependent on. The app also uses lame_enc.dll, which introduces a few more dependencies.
I’m guessing this is a common problem with VB6 apps (although it’s possible that I just sucked as a programmer 10 years ago). Is there some magical installer/updater out there that makes sure all the VB6 dependencies are what they need to be for a VB6 app to function properly?
One option is to contact Microsoft technical support. The VB6 runtime is fully supported on Windows 7. You may need to pay for a “support incident”: or it may be free, for instance if you have an MSDN subscription (good idea to get one).