AutoHotkey Community

jared · Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 7

The "URLDownloadToFile" function crashes AHK wenn die Download some Sites. This does not happen with every Websit. So a Download of http://www.heise.de will work fine, but AHK crashes with a Windows-Error-Message when ein want to download http://www.autohotkey.com for example. When this happens, URLDownloadToFile startet do download the requestet URL but will abort bevor it's finished. The targetfile then alway as a size of a mulitple of 4096 Bytes (e.g. 12288 or 28672 Bytes).

For testing I use this really simple script

SKAN · Joined: 26 Dec 2005 Posts: 5890

jared · Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 7

Hmm, this one is a little bit large, since it's more than 5x the size of the application it's going to be used in. The application shall be distributed and frequently updated over Internet and therefor be as small as possible.

PhiLho · Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 9:36 am Post subject:

URLDownloadToVar
_________________

vPhiLho := RegExReplace("Philippe Lhoste", "^(\w{3})\w*\s+\b(\w{3})\w*$", "$1$2")

jared · Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 7

Wow! This seems to work. Very nice one! Thanks!

jared · Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 7

Well, after testing it a little more this funktion also seems not to work. The same bug/crash here.

For example:
When I download "http://www.autohotkey.com/download/CurrentVersion.txt" every thing is fine.
When downloading "http://www.autohotkey.com/" AHK crashes with the same error occuring with URLDownloadToFile.

So, i've played arround a little with your Code and it looks like the "FreeLibrary" call comes a little to soon (on my System?!?). When I take out this line, no Error happens. Then I tryed out what would happen if I put a little sleep bevor the "FreeLibrary"-call and it seem that even a really short break like "sleep 10" fixes the Problem.

Du you have any idea why this happens?

My System:
WinXP SP2, latest Patches
Athlon XP 2000 MHz, 1GB RAM

the modified Code:

Chris · Site Admin Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 10467

Thanks for the follow-up; its good to see there's a work-around.

Since I can't reproduce any UrlDownloadtoFile crashing on my XP SP2 system, this is probably being caused by something unusual about your system -- such as an add-on to MSIE or firewall/proxy settings. If anyone else observes UrlDownloadtoFile to crash on particular URLs, please post here.

jared · Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 7

Ahh, I give up!

The error doesn't occour anymore with the "sleep" but the file still won't be downloaded completely. Download still stops after 26426 Bytes.

Any idea?

jared · Joined: 02 Jul 2006 Posts: 7

Well deactivating all my IE Add-ons didn't help anything. Neither playing arround with the "internet-options" did (don't actually know how this menu is called in the english version of IE).

But I've just found out something else:
Actually the function did download the whole file and even went on downloading while there is nothing more to load. So in the target file/var contains the closing "</html>"-tag, which usually marks the end of a HTML-File. But after this line it repeats some of the last lines of the HTML-Code just before the "</html>"-tag. This error seems like a "buffer-thing" or something like that.

I would upload an example, but there seems to be no attachment-option in this forum?!?

Chris · Site Admin Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 10467

Thanks for the report. However, even if the problem could be reproduced on other systems, I'm not sure there's any way to fix it. This is because UrlDownloadtoFile basically amounts to just a few API calls (and the program has no control of their internal workings).

However, there may be alternate downloading methods added in the future to provide more features. Such methods might not suffer from as many system-specific issues.

POINTS · Joined: 18 Jan 2006 Posts: 284

I'm having the same sort of problem with URLDownloadToFile. The problem is that the script crashes (compiled or not) when it gets to this command (I think). It was working fine until version v1.0.44.07, where the URL is retrieved directly from the remote server without the need of a "fakeParam". Also, the problem ONLY happens when the script runs at startup.

I disabled everything that runs at startup (even the hidden things) and it still crashes. The only thing that seems to be causing the crash is how soon the script is run after Windows starts up.

I have pretty much the same system as the other guy. It's a AMD 1800+ with 1 gig of RAM, XP Pro SP2. If you want to give me something to try, I can do it without any problems (I can reproduce the error every time I start up).

Also, it does work when I use a startup manager to make the startup script one of the last items to run. I'm not sure why this does this unless one of the other startup items is causing a problem.

The problem isn't a major concern now (as long as most users don't have this happen to them when they run my program at startup). It's probably an internal windows problem like you said. I can give you a little more information about when it crashes. This is what the uncompiled script looks like:

Window Title: AutoHotkey

Chris · Site Admin Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 10467

Thanks for the info. Since the crash seems to occur inside a Windows DLL and since I'm still unable to spot any bugs in UrlDownloadtoFile, I think it's best to stick with known workarounds for this (as you said) -- at least until some better solution is found.

Titan · Joined: 11 Aug 2004 Posts: 5068 Location: imaginationland

Chris · Site Admin Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 10467

That's a good point. XP is quite aggressive about showing the user the desktop as soon as possible. It may also launch your Startup items before everything is actually in place to load web pages (I had a similar problem when I tried to launch MSIE from a Startup shortcut, but that was a couple years ago and I thought they had fixed it).