If I were a betting person, I'd put my money on Scitech Display Drivers as the problem. The Trap E is the key - I have a laptop where the Scitech drivers routinely caused a Trap E, and I had to load other display drivers for eComStation to run reliably. I'd be very surprised if a Dos program running in a VDM would bring the entire system down. Although it would be a pain in the patootie to do, yo might want to backlevel your video drivers to VGA or to a non-GRADD video driver specific to your hardware and see if that solves the problem. Steve Crutchfield Deputy Director for Staff Analysis and Communications USDA Economic Research Service 1800 M Street NW Room 2164N Washington, DC, 20036 (202) 694 5406 scrutch@xxxxxxxx Visit the ERS Wesbsite: http://www.ers.usda.gov >>> jr_fox@xxxxxxxx 07/23/02 03:22PM >>> Hi Robert. Thanks for getting back to me. Robert Holmgren wrote: > ** Reply to message from "J. R. Fox"on Mon, 22 Jul 2002 > 23:04:51 -0800 > > Can U2 crash OS/2? I doubt it. Never has here! Carl's never mentioned it. > I'm running MCP v2 (Warp v4.52) rather than ECS, That should be the same kernel level (Internal Rev. 14.088_W4); I think the differences with MCP are more decorative than substantive. > Look, all that happens when you LOAD U2 is that it gets > indexed. Nothing is "run". O.K. > XyWrite could be crashing the VDM, though, in numerous ways. Not just the DOS session -- that would be a lot less terrible. Whatever the cause, it is taking down everything. In OS/2, normally a session could get torpedoed by some problem or something that is misbehaving, but the damage will be compartmentalized and won't bring down the os. > It could be running out of memory, and that in turn is causing > an exception in the kernel. It's a curiosity that the same Xy + Startup + U2 file does *not* produce this result here under W4 / FP9 or WSEB (the server edition, which I think is equivalent to FP-15). I mean, if I'm pushing the limits and running out of memory, wouldn't that be a constant ? I am starting to suspect that the joker in this pack may be the eval. version of SDD Pro. (SDD is the GRADD-based set that supports most of the video cards & chipsets on the market.) Every other boot partition is using the native Matrox 2.36 video drivers, which have a very long and a very good track record on successive hardware generations of this desktop system. There are enough variables, though, and I have done relatively little word processing so far under ECS, because that partition is in such an early stage of construction. So it's hard to be sure, without a lot more testing. > When you successfully load XyWrite including U2, > what does VA/NV $M+6 say? If it reports over 20[Kb], you are dangerously > close to OOM (out of mem) in the programming part of memory. I'll run these checks you suggested and report back. Right now, I'm working in the old W4 "Production" partition, which is quite stable and has no significant problems. > if you have a lot of programming Save/Gets attached > to specific keys, that will gobble up memory like candy. I do have some, and have had 'em there for a loooong time. > (It's a very stupid and wasteful way to organize things too -- all code is loaded > verbatim, whereas with U2 all you load is a 15-20 byte pointer to each frame.) I know, I know. Chalk it up to inertia. > Don't load HLP (and/or DLG) unless you really need it. Those I might be able to dispense with. But I'd like to have access to them again when there _is_ a need. > Send me your STARTUP.INT as an attachment. Attached. I'm sure you'll find many unsavory practices therein. If we're going to overhaul Startup, I'm sure this will give rise to other questions. > Humongous KBD files with a lot of keystroking around are also a no-no -- I wouldn't call the one I use humongous, but maybe not svelte either. It's under 25k, including a generous amount of comments, and a convenient reprise of the Kbd layout diagram closer to the ALT table. Don't the instructions for a number of the goodies you guys have crafted provide Kbd programming strings ? > put the keystrokes in a U2 frame, it's much more economical for memory! A project for my To Do List, though I'm not sure I know how (is most of the stuff in U2 a Type 5 frame these days ?), and have some concern as to how time consuming this task would be. Jordan