Important Medical App getting Application Errors, help!

[mcravenufo]

Does anyone have any more idea's on how to find the problem or fix it?

A friend of mine is an eye surgeon. He uses an electronic medical records system.
He contacted the support for the application but they said to contact MS. He also has had 3 IT companies look at it to no avail. He didn't want to bother me with the problem but I am his last hope.

The application (dream.exe) is receiving Application Errors. It seems to happen when he Opens a patient note to work on and not really when he saves a patient note. Unless it is still trying to save while he is opening the next patient.

I had him replace the memory but the error still occurs.

When the app freezes it says hit okay to close but hit cancel to debug and then it comes up with visual studio and says unhandled win exception error occurred.
Unhandled exception at 0x77fcaea0 in DREAM.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation writing location 0x00000000.

Then it pops up to break or continue. When he hits continue it keeps reading.
Unhandled exception at 0x77fcaea0 in DREAM.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation writing location 0x00000000.

When he hits break, the Disassembly window below comes up.

 

[RedShark]

Unfortunately, this level of information is not useful at resolving the problem. All it tells us is that the the program tried to dereference a NULL pointer, which is bad (as you might have guessed).

All the usual troubleshooting techniques apply:
- Does the program crash the same way every time? Is it reproducible? It may simply be a bug in the program. Since it sounds reproducible, I'm leaning toward this.
- Does the problem happen if the software runs on some other machine? Maybe it's bad RAM? You replaced the RAM, so that seems unlikely. Could be bad power? Maybe the nearby X-RAY machine is throwing it off
- Has the problem always occurred or did it just start? Any changes to the system configuration? New hardware, software, patches etc?

 

[mcravenufo]

He said it did crash on an older server as well.
It also seems to crash at random times but only on opening unfinished notes to go back and finish them. If he opens old notes that are finished it never does it.
It may be the application but the support for the application just told him to contact MS.

 

[Sniper|3d-R|]

Tell him to go back to the company's software IT and ask why its an MS issue? They (the software company) should have more info on this, and ways to find a work around.

Some common things I would try is to create a new user account, and try the software within that new user account.

 

[RedShark]

Based on the information you've provided, it sounds like a bug with the application in question. I also agree with the previous poster that this is almost certainly not an MS issue. I'd say try your luck with the software vendor's tech support again, and see if they still tell you to go to MS. Also, verify that this software is being run on a supported OS. If it's older, it may have been designed for 95/98, and simply doesn't support whatever he's using.

If you have a lot of flexibility, you could try running it in a VM and see if you can reproduce it there. That ensures a clean OS installation, and eliminates a large number of potential software issues. A separate user account would probably be a quicker, simpler test that might also reveal something, as suggested by Sniper|3d-R|.