XY and Memory Weirdness

[Harmon Seaver hseaver@xxxxxxxx]

Apparantly XY4 (and probably XYW) is extraordainarily sensitive to
memory differences. I've been having all sorts of strange things
happening ever since I installed a new motherboard and cpu (Shuttle
Spacewalker 557 and Cyrix P166+) and hadn't resolved them despite
repeated calls to Shuttle's tech support. WinOS2 got *very* flakey,
Xwindows crashed a lot in Linux, etc.
  The weirdest thing, tho, was problems with XY4. The first thing I
noticed was after also getting a new Lexmark Optra R printer, the Linux
postscript worked fine, OS/2's Optra R driver worked fine (and any OS/2
app like Describe printed great) but I couldn't get the Post-Hp.prn
driver for XY to even load. I got a whole string of very strange
messages when I'd try to load it, and then couldn't print from XY under
OS/2, unless I then reloaded my old Panasonic laser printer driver (non
postscript). Exceedingly weird! I posted to this list about the problem,
but got no answer.
  Then I tried booting straight DOS, and starting XY4. Zowie! Major
weirdness. I hadn't used XY under dos in ages. It started up okay,
looked alright, and I could call up a file, but trying graphic view sent
the screen into la-la land, and required a hard reset. Just hitting f10
to call up the menu bar did the same thing, although sometimes the menu
bar would come up, then the screen went crazy when I tried to access
anything on it. Quite frankly, I thought that either XY had become
corrupted or I had a dos virus. Two different virus checkers found
nothing, and restoring XY from a tape backup from last summer did
nothing either.
  Anyway, Eric's post on memory manager had me wondering, especially
since XY worked -- more or less -- in OS/2 and not in DOS, so obviously
OS/2's superior memory management made a big difference. Also, Robert's
posts stating that he had no such problems as others did bolstered that
idea. I was pretty sure my two 16meg EDO simms were okay, since they
worked alright in other motherboards. I then tried disabling my external
(L2) cache in the bios, and --- amazing, all the weirdness went away. XY
works fine in DOS now, and in OS/2, the postscript drivers load just
fine as they should, and print great.
  Soooo -- the bottom line is this: XY does some very strange things
with memory, not like other DOS apps. Throughout all this, other
DOS/windoz apps seemed to work okay. Corel Draw and Multimedia Toolbook,
for instance, both of which make heavy memory demands, being graphical
apps, worked just fine.
  I'd suggest the (1) anyone having weird behavior in XY try a
different memory manager (the best one for DOS, I think, is the one
included in PC-DOS 7) and also thoroughly check out their memory and
cache for defective chips; and (2) TTG needs to take a good look at how
XY deals with memory -- obviously something in the code is not at all
kosher.

H.