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Olivier Beltrami · Guest

This is a brain-twister for all you Paradox gurus out there ;-)

My app shares Paradox tables with a C++ DLL which is loaded in memory by
QuarkXPress (a desktop publishing software). At one customer site, if my app
is running, then when the DLL called by QuarkXPress 6 tries to call
DbiInit() the call fails without any error code; just goes poof ! But if my
app is not running, then all is well.

Here are the givens :

1) I have set localshare to true and followed all the procedures to share
paradox tables. I have checked that there is only one copy of idapi32.dll. I
have tried to purge my user's system of the BDE and re-installed it.

2) This setup works everywhere in the world except at one user site, and
then at that user site is works with every version of QuarkXPress (3-4-5)
except 6. That is to say, after the call to DbiInit fails with QuarkXPress
6, if I immediately try to run the same thing, but calling my DLL from
QuarkXPress 3, 4 or 5 then all is well.

3) If my app is not running, then all is well with every version of
QuarkXPress.

4) PrivateDirs are all local (in c:temp and some individual subfolders) on
a W2K workstation, NetDir is on a shared drive on an NT4 Server.

I am obviously not looking for assistance in debugging my C++ DLL used with
QuarkXPress, and at any rate I do not believe the problem is in the DLL,
since it works everywhere fine, and at my customer site fine as long as my
app is not running.

What I am looking for is guesses on what the problem could be. What could
make a call to DbiInit fail if there are other BDE apps running ? My guess
is that it has to do the locking of some files by QuarkXPress 6. Could it be
that it tries to get an exclusive lock on the idapi32.CFG file and that it
works fine as long as no other BDE app is running ?

Any ideas, however wild, are welcome.

TIA,

Olivier Beltrami
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Bill Todd · Guest

That is almost certainly not the problem. DLLs are loaded by Windows, not
by the application. If the DLL is statically linked into Quark Express
then it is loaded automatically. If the DLL is being loaded dynamically by
Quark Express then Quark Express is calling the Windows API LoadLibrary
function.

A wild guess is to increase the shared memory size or change the shared
memory location or both.

--
Bill Todd (TeamB)
TeamB cannot answer questions received via email