Re: This time a real clip bug: it crashes...

[Bob Zimmerman zimmerman@xxxxxxxx]

Yo,

Lots of advice last night. Thank you all. Here's what I have done, and what happened after I did it:

First I lowered my Chunksz setting in xywwweb.reg to 380, as suggested by Robert. This kind of
worked, as CLIP no longer crashes when a selection is between 381 and 573 bytes. However, now it
crashes if a selection is larger than 953 bytes. I don't yet know if there is an upper limit where
the crashes will stop: so far the largest selection I have done is 4920, and CLIP still crashed at
that number.

Then I tried all of Patricia's suggestions. First I did VA/NV $M+6, and got 11! I then searched the
Xywrite mail search engine to find out how to lower it, then commented out the "LDSGT
saveget.sgt" and "LOAD dict.hyp" lines in my startup.int file. (By the way, what is
dict.hyp for?) That lowered the VA/NV $M+6 number to 2. Unfortunately, this didn't change CLIP's
behavior: it still crashed with any selection over 953 bytes.

Next I changed the EMS setting in Xy4's Windows Properties to 5120. This also had no effect on the
crashes. (Note that I have always left these Win settings at the defaults.)

I also used List to check several different crashing selections. None had any 3 byte characters.

Patricia also asked "Why are you closing XyW all the time?" Just to clarify, I am not
using XyWin, but Xy4. I close it after each email because I always close programs down when I done
using them. Otherwise, they clutter up my working space. I have been doing this for years with both
Windows and DOS programs, and have never noticed any degradation of operation. (The only recent case
where I have encountered memory leak problems is with a specialized Java program I use for cave
cartography, written by a programmer friend. The program has lots of bugs, so having problems like
this has not been surprising.)

However, assuming Patricia might be right, I experimented with using CLIP right after rebooting and
loading Xy4 once. CLIP's behavior was the same, still crashing with selections over 953 bytes.

Next I loaded into U2 the older version of CLIP that Robert had emailed me earlier in the week, just
to see if it would make a difference. As predicted by Robert, it did. I was immediately able to clip
more than 2000 bytes. In fact, I tried a selection that was 18,539 bytes long, and the OLDCLIP
worked with no problem. Though I can use this version without crashing, it means that everytime I
want to update U2 I have the extra chore of manually switching from the standard CLIP to this older
version.

If possible, I'd rather find out the problem with the standard CLIP. In fact, if I could get CLIP to
only crash at selections above 5000 bytes, that would probably mean that I would almost never see
the problem, as most emails are much shorter than this.

Bo
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