Roger Cigol

Yes: one of the worst things about thread safe / non-safe issues is that they do not always show themselves. A ThreadSafety issue can remain unnoticed during all your development and then you send it off to your customer and it falls over immediately. It has happened to me. Any thread work needs very careful design so that such bugs (which are the hardest to find) are avoided in the first place.

We have successfully written a 64bit C++ Builder App that ran on a Windows 10 64 bit OS and talked to an MS Access database. But you need to use the microsoft 64bit access run time driver package. This cannot exist along side the MS Access program. So either you have to uninstall MS Access before installing the 64bit driver package or you run the 64 bit application in a virtual machine with the MS Access *.mdb and other files on a drive that the virtual machine can connect to.

Embarcadero have not dropped support for MS SQL Server. It's just not in "Professional". I think "Professional" has always been limited to local databases only. MS SQL Server would rarely be expected to use just for a local database.

I think you are being a little unrealistic here in terms of business costings.

I use PostgreSQL and all seems good to me.

And yes, the viewing of data at design time using a 64bit database does work with 12.3 (certainly with 64bit versions of postgreSQL which is what I work with). The 64bit IDE is a first step. Of course we would all like it to work perfectly and to have had it a year ago but at least this shows it is coming. I am very much in favour of Embarcadero releasing stuff with limited functionality but which works rather than trying to rush too much out too quickly and therefore it all being very buggy. They have gone down this route in the past but seem to have learnt that this puts customers off. They do now seem to be releasing smaller changes at a time but smaller changes that work. I think this is much better for us users.

It seems that Embarcadero are encouraging C++ (new tool chain) users to save source code as UTF-8 with BOM. Can anyone find an option in the IDE set up to force files to be saved in this format ?

Thanks @Uwe Raabe I knew it had to be somewhere - and I have now found both with the help of your hints!

It's great to be able to use 64bit PostgreSQL interface in the 64bit IDE - You can see the database contents at design time.

Side note: very much off topic: but I love sending postcards and still send about hundred to different friends each year as I travel around.

VCL - RAD Studio 12.2 C++ Classic Compiler I have a windows C++ (Classic compiler) VCL application that uses TDirectory::GetDirectories() and TDirectory::GetFiles() to get lists of files from the Windows OS file structure. These files are then opened for read or write using stl ofstream and ifstream along with >> and << operators. The same code has been in use on different instances of the application on different machines (including Win XP and Windows 7). I have a new instance where the operating system is Windows 10 LTSC version 10.0.19044 build 19044. I have not run it on this version of windows before. Problem; Directory and file lists, reading and writing work ok for a longish time (24 hours sometimes, 30 hours sometimes, 10 hours sometimes) and then the calls to TDirectory::GetDirectories() and TDirectory::GetFiles() both return empty lists. Writing to a log file (with a fixed file name) also stops working at this time. It's as if my application has been locked out of the file system somehow. At this point it is possible to use File Explorer to see that there still are files and directories present. It is possible to open the files by other applications. (some are plain text files and can be opened with notepad). The files are stored in a directory inside C:\Users\Public\Documents\ so should be available to all applications all of the time. I cannot offer a reproducible example - all my code works fine on my development machine (which is Windows 10 Pro build 19045.5371 22H2). This is true if I run it under the IDE debugger or as a free standing exe. I wonder if any of my fellow Delphi-Praxis colleagues might have any similar experiences or can offer some ideas of what I should try next ?

Many thanks to all who helped - learning about the sysintern functions (handle.exe was the life saver) etc much appreciated. Special thanks to @Kas Ob. @Remy Lebeau @Der schöne Günther @Lajos Juhász

POSITIVE RESULT Having got the error code 1450 and then, very helpfully, being pointed in the direction of the "handle.exe" utility on sysintern this got us to a much better position: we could run our software and use "handle" to confirm that something was generating this continuous stream of unwanted (and presumably unused) handles which was eventually reaching some kind of windows out of resources threshold. This enabled us to (temporarily) remove parts of our code that talk to different bits of hardware and then repeat the test to check for unwanted handle production. We found that it was calls to a commercial driver for a specialist PCIe card that is used by our system that was the cause of the problem. This comes from a large respected scientific corporation, who's products we have worked with for a good many years (previously without any problems). Even better news: As part of this commercial package comes a separate test utility that allows you to check that card and driver have been installed correctly. This, too, gives the same stream of unwanted handles. So we are now able to go back to designer/manufacturer of the card/driver and show them how to spot the problem, which exists just using their own software. Fingers crossed that they will come back with a fix quickly!

Why would this kind of problem mean that only my application is affected? When the problem happens it is still possible to read and write files to the directories using windows explorer (eg right click and create a new text file).

Auto run: If I look for coloured entries - which are the ones with "not verified"..... In Services I see one: Sense Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection Service: Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection service helps protect against advanced threats by monitoring and reporting security events that happen on the computer. (Not Verified) Microsoft Corporation C:\Program Files\Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection\MsSense.exe Mon Feb 10 16:31:35 2025 In Drivers I see three: BthA2dp Microsoft Bluetooth A2dp driver: Bluetooth A2DP Driver (Not Verified) Microsoft Corporation C:\Windows\System32\drivers\BthA2dp.sys Sat Dec 7 09:07:47 2019 BthHFEnum Microsoft Bluetooth Hands-Free Profile driver: Bluetooth Hands-Free Audio and Call Control HID Enumerator (Not Verified) Microsoft Corporation C:\Windows\System32\drivers\bthhfenum.sys Sat Dec 7 09:07:47 2019 Adobe Type Manager File not found: atmfd.dll The first two are in subcategory: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services The last one is in subcategory: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Font drivers

Running SFC did not sound dumb to me (either at the time you posted it, or now). This was done at end of January, after we had done a full "check for updates" iteration round a few times (until it said "all up to date").

So is this suspect driver related to file handling ? or could it be any driver on the machine ?

Thank you, Kas. I have downloaded WinObjEx (exe) and run it. I click on the search (magnifier glass) icon and then enter MyMutex1 and click on Find. It says no objects found. I get the same result if repeat but with search only for "Mutant" in the drop down.

@Kas Ob. My actual app is a 32 bit exe - will the 64bit WinObjEx64 still be ok to help us (you!) get to the bottom of this ?

I have sysinternals process monitor running on the machine. I get a long list of processes - but can't see my application mentioned anywhere (note - may application it is not actually doing anything at present - but it is still running) Any tips on how to drive this ?

I have remote access to the machine, My application is still running and I can confirm that it is still not able to create / write to any files. I have used the sysinternal handle.exe utility. When run with -a -p nnnn >MyOuptutTextFile.txt // (where nnnn = my application process ID) When I look at the resulting output file it is 400MB long and almost all of it is taken up with the same entries, here's an extract 3B4: <Unknown type> \Sessions\1\BaseNamedObjects\MyMutex1 3B8: <Unknown type> \Sessions\1\BaseNamedObjects\MyMutex1 // loads and loads and loads of entries here // - and then the file ends F71D78: <Unknown type> \Sessions\1\BaseNamedObjects\MyMutex1 F71D7C: <Unknown type> \Sessions\1\BaseNamedObjects\MyMutex1 F71D80: <Unknown type> \Sessions\1\BaseNamedObjects\MyMutex1 F71D84: <Unknown type> \Sessions\1\BaseNamedObjects\MyMutex1 F71D88: <Unknown type> \Sessions\1\BaseNamedObjects\MyMutex1 F71D8C: <Unknown type> \Sessions\1\BaseNamedObjects\MyMutex1 F71D90: <Unknown type> \Sessions\1\BaseNamedObjects\MyMutex1 F71D94: <Unknown type> \Sess This doesn't look healthy to me - but what does this line mean?

@Lajos Juhász How can I check this ?

Are you sure that "service" means a windows service in this context? I am not so sure that MS error messages are so precise! I think this just means a "general service provided by the operating system" - but I could be wrong. @Kas Ob. I am a bit out of my depth with this one - so your expertise is really welcome and appreciated. So above question is just me being ultra cautious!

When I open resource monitor I see 2 threads and 15 handle names (13 are files, one is the application exe and one is the application mutex created and checked by our application (we use this to prevent two instances being run at the same time) So this doesn't show any problem. Hard Disk still has 43GB used of a total capacity of 930GB

When I open up task manager I see 0% for CPU, disk and network, very low power useage and only 14.7MB of memory useage - and it's been running for a week and a half, so doesn't look like a memory leak.