by alexgieg » March 20th, 2021, 9:14 pm
I made an account to comment on this. I've been experiencing this problem, or a similar one, for a few months, intermittently.
AMNO is set to start on boot, so when I log in I'm usually presented with it prompting me to enter my password for my notes file. However, many times it didn't open, and rather a screen informing there was an error opening it appeared. I clicked OK, then after a few seconds the same window appeared. I clicked OK again, and it didn't come back. However, trying to open AMNO manually triggered the same error window. So the only way to run it was to reboot the machine, sometimes twice.
I noticed two things:
The first is that, when this happens, the executable C:\Program Files (x86)\AllMyNotes Organizer\AllMyNotes.exe becomes undeletable. Trying to delete it, even on a Windows Explorer with Administrator rights, causes Windows to inform the file cannot be deleted because it's in use by AllMyNotes.exe, even though I can see in Task Manager that no AllMyNotes.exe process is running. This is weird, to say the least.
The second thing I noticed were those strange random noises in allmynotes.log mentioned above. Pages upon pages of weird characters.
So, I don't think this is an error related to any specific Windows update, but something else.
Maybe AMNO is opening skin files in read-and-write mode, rather than in read-only mode, and some runaway routine is causing the "write" operation to happen when it shouldn't? Or maybe it isn't failing back into a graceful state when it cannot read a faulty skin, and is dumping random contents read from a pointer that should be pointing to a string but ends up pointing to some other memory location? Maybe both things, as in, it's corrupting the skin config file, and then writing down a corrupted log? Or maybe the log file isn't being closed properly upon crash, so Windows believe the full sector/cluster belongs to the file, and is showing the random contents that was in that disk sector? Or something else altogether?
I'm attaching two screenshots. The first shows the beginning of one such string of random noise. The second shows normal logging resuming after I uninstalled AMNO, rebooted, manually deleted the AllMyNotes.exe file which the uninstaller couldn't delete, then reinstalled it and ran it again. I'm not sending the full log file because that random noise might not be truly random and contain sensitive information, so I think it better not to send it in full. But I can say it's four or five pages of the random characters until normal logging resumes.
I think it'd be a good idea to add some extra sanity checks on the skin reading and log writing routines. Whatever the problem is, it seems to happen in the space between trying to read a skin, failing, and writing a log about the failure. Maybe that'll help figure out the true cause.
I hope this helps!
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- 2021-03-20 (4).png (175.04 KiB) Viewed 4146 times
I made an account to comment on this. I've been experiencing this problem, or a similar one, for a few months, intermittently.
AMNO is set to start on boot, so when I log in I'm usually presented with it prompting me to enter my password for my notes file. However, many times it didn't open, and rather a screen informing there was an error opening it appeared. I clicked OK, then after a few seconds the same window appeared. I clicked OK again, and it didn't come back. However, trying to open AMNO manually triggered the same error window. So the only way to run it was to reboot the machine, sometimes twice.
I noticed two things:
The first is that, when this happens, the executable C:\Program Files (x86)\AllMyNotes Organizer\AllMyNotes.exe becomes undeletable. Trying to delete it, even on a Windows Explorer with Administrator rights, causes Windows to inform the file cannot be deleted because it's in use by AllMyNotes.exe, even though I can see in Task Manager that no AllMyNotes.exe process is running. This is weird, to say the least.
The second thing I noticed were those strange random noises in allmynotes.log mentioned above. Pages upon pages of weird characters.
So, I don't think this is an error related to any specific Windows update, but something else.
Maybe AMNO is opening skin files in read-and-write mode, rather than in read-only mode, and some runaway routine is causing the "write" operation to happen when it shouldn't? Or maybe it isn't failing back into a graceful state when it cannot read a faulty skin, and is dumping random contents read from a pointer that should be pointing to a string but ends up pointing to some other memory location? Maybe both things, as in, it's corrupting the skin config file, and then writing down a corrupted log? Or maybe the log file isn't being closed properly upon crash, so Windows believe the full sector/cluster belongs to the file, and is showing the random contents that was in that disk sector? Or something else altogether?
I'm attaching two screenshots. The first shows the beginning of one such string of random noise. The second shows normal logging resuming after I uninstalled AMNO, rebooted, manually deleted the AllMyNotes.exe file which the uninstaller couldn't delete, then reinstalled it and ran it again. I'm not sending the full log file because that random noise might not be truly random and contain sensitive information, so I think it better not to send it in full. But I can say it's four or five pages of the random characters until normal logging resumes.
I think it'd be a good idea to add some extra sanity checks on the skin reading and log writing routines. Whatever the problem is, it seems to happen in the space between trying to read a skin, failing, and writing a log about the failure. Maybe that'll help figure out the true cause.
I hope this helps!