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Travis1977

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 16, 2003
1
0
Hi,
Recently, I have been having trouble running Help Viewer.app; it crashes immediately after I start it up. I did a clean install, but the problem persists. So, I decided to try debugging it myself.

First I loaded the exe. into a blank project on Xcode and ran GDB. The backtrace shows frame #0 at 0x90196a44. This address points to CFStringGetLength. Looking at the crash log:

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE

Thread 0 Crashed:
#0 0x90196a5c in 0x90196a5c
#1 0x8d384e04 in CFStringCopyConvertingHTMLEntityCharacters (CFStringCopyConvertingHTMLEntityCharacters + 32)
#2 0x8d38f254 in -[HelpView _extractTitleAndIconFromBooks]
(-[HelpView _extractTitleAndIconFromBooks]+136)

Now, as I understand it, CFStringGetLength is one of the primitive functions of CFString; the other being CFStringGetCharacterIndex. So the problem lies not in the copy and conversion of the HTML characters, but the number of Unicode characters in the CFString object...right?

Next, I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at the attributes of the CFString object. So I went back and called CFShowStr in GDB:

(gdb)call (void) CFShowStr(0x90196a44)
This is an NSString, not CFString

I don't know the Cocoa command for CFShowString, so I found myself stuck at this point. I wondered, "Where should I go from here?"

I disassembled the function CFStringGetLength, but didn't see much.

Then I pulled up the list of strings in the .exe:

root# strings -o 'Help Viewer'

...now I have a (long) list of string names and their offsets.

My question is, am I headed in the right direction and where should I go from here?

Someone's help would be much appreatiated:)

Thanks
 
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