Anonymous wrote:

Azure wrote:Well, I do have those problems too and I'm using XP SP2. I'm ripping all my CDs like crazy and I keep getting those errors aparently in a random manner -sometimes volume leveling an album freezes MM, sometimes not-. Also, when freezeing I usually see two types of monkey behaviour:

1. MM is using 0% of CPU and there is/are some Decoder.exe process at 0% CPU too. MM responds to my request of closing by telling me about background processes running. Unless I kill first those Decoder.exe, MM won't exit, but it isn't frozen itself, just waiting for them to end -though the player itself keeps working fine-.

2. MM is wasting my CPU and it won't respond to me at all. I have to kill the task. 10% of times it won't be killed but it will drop to 0% CPU and become immortal -> I have to shutdown my computer, most of the time by turning off the power .

If I'm just listening to music, freezes are way less common than if I'm ripping CDs to MP3. It doesn't seem to be an approximate number of files to which unstability arises. Sometimes I can autoorganize hundreds of files with a good result, sometimes it freezes just updating the genre of a 10 track album.

I know this post itself may not be very useful, but to let know I have these en-mass errors too in a XP SP2 / P4 3.2GHz / 1GB RAM. I have just downloaded the debugging version to help pinpoint where the problem comes from, because I reinstalled my computer two weeks ago, and before I think I was using a non-gold 2.4 version that worked flawlessly (though it didn't have real time file monitoring and other stuff).

Thanks for the time to read this

i take it your still getting this also.

i have set the config in 98 to start up only 5 programs that are required.
explorer.
systtray
loadqm
tclock.
maxmem.

there might be one other one i can't remeber off hand what the ms name would be for it.
but that is all that starts up. when i restart the 98.
monkey and the others start by task scheduler.
i still get this editing error in win98 and have gotten it at times in winXp but not much in Xp i just don't do more then 10 or 20 songs when editing
anymore in either computer but this is a major pain in the but to some one like me that types in all the infromation for all the songs. i don't get any song information from online. i need to beable to edit all the songs i put in more then 10 or 20 at a time.
it is something i thought was going to be fixed with a new database but did not get fixed completely. there is still something causing it. and still something causing the volume anaylizing to not work on the songs in win98 but the same songs went done with xp get anaylized?

maybe they are going to get all this fixed in the 3.0 version?
if so then i 'll update the 98 with that version.
but your cpu symptons looks like it might be causing all the errors on mine too.

okay i retryed that album art access error message thing and it still gave it to me.

so i started looking for programs that might be messing with the monkey.

i found none that i could see.

i did find a program that i had almost forgot about.

so is started it up again to use it. i mostly only start it to keep it from disapearing from lack of use. but this time i am using it.

you old timers out there might know it. the name is "Bomb Shelter"
it is from mcafee's "nuts and bolts" program suite.

it will optimize the globle dos and it locks the system's kernel segments in memory and write protects them and IDL's and VMM's as well as VxD's

it will keep them so the other programs can use them but can not mess them up.

well i started that program up.

and then i did a case check of 3750 songs with media monkey and it found about 100 songs it needed to fix.

so i then checked to see if the album art no access error would show up again when i right clicked on it. which to my surprise it did not show the error?

and then i did a case check of 1750 songs with media monkey and it found about 100 songs it needed to fix.

so it fixed 200 songs it must be messed up now.

so i thought to check the album art error as now it should show up.
but it still did not cause the error to show up.

so i thought this is too good i'll try moving a hog's load of songs to a new directory.

so i did. i moved 5700 +- 50 songs. to a new directory on the same hard drive. it took some time but monkey did not crash. and it changed all the paths in the playlists.

so now it has to be messed up right?

nope it did not show the canvas does not allow drawing error or the album art error.

so this can only mean that monkey is messing with something in the system kernel area or in the Vxds, or the VMM, or the IDL's.

and that is what causes the errors to show up.

okay i did edit about 30 songs. and it still gave me the canvas can not draw/ does not allow drawing error.

and locked up monkey with all the alerts.

so i went through the advanced repair programs and did not find any drivers left over?

i did find some useful information from running one of them old repair app's. it did not find anything wrong with monkey exe when it scanned it but the program was wrote foe win95 and updated to 98 so the scanning might not have been able to find any errors. it is not my most used repair application because of that.

how ever i did find through searching its data base that the dos dispaly might need more memory if the applications were locking up.? more video ram, that made me think some what, and i did a check up on the tweaking i had. seems i had turned off the allow more memory for dos. option. so i turned that back on and i went to the plugin for spare stacks. i upped the spare stacks to 24 stacks.

rebooted and then started adding more songs.

we today i started adding in the songs to monkey's database all was going fine all songs went in ? (i did use the autofill feature in the tags)
but after adding in about 47 songs and adding the linked album art to their tags i then tried to check the album art by right clicking on the image to get the menu. it gave me an access violiation error monkey was not allowed to use that memory block?

it did that to me the other day and then sent out the alerts to lock up the computer. this time i tried several times to get the art menu to show. and it kept giving me the violation error but it did not lock up monkey.

so i think making the computer save more memory for dos, and upping the number of spare stacks did help but was not the complete answer.

i rebooted and have not tried the album art yet but i don't get that violation message when i use it on this xp.

i am not sure if this info will help any of you others but it might?
it might not even have been fixed on my win98 computer yet?

roving cowboy / keith hall.

not logged in just posting over the fence again.

rovingcowboy I sympathize with you. I know how frustrating this can be. In my case and possibly yours, I had an orphaned driver. Unfortunately I have not run 98 for a eon, so I am unsure of what tools are available to you to find it. I had used similar programs as what you describe to find those loose drivers. They found nothing. As I stated above MS trapped the driver in question "illegally seizing memory allocated to another operation" (not actual wording, but aproximate). When the darned thing grabbed the memory from MM or any other faulting program, then the system crashed. Kinda explains the problem in a nutshell. Maybe the best idea for you is to go to MS and find if they have a similar program for debugging 98 that I described above for NTFS systems. The whole problem occurs when a wild driver like this meets a program (in this case MM) that has a fault occuring in that program giving the wild driver access, which then crashes the OS. MM does have a bug and I am sure that Jiri, Rusty and crew know about it and are working to clear it up.

Nocreek

so you and rusty think it is a driver still stuck in the system for some uninstalled program?

i am not sure on my win98. i use the cybermedia unistaller that was made for win 95, and then updated by mcafee when they bought it to work on win98 and win Me and win 2k.

i run that and have it set to clear out any files that are unused in so many days. so if the programs are gone and left anything behind it finds them when i run it and it cleans them out. even drivers.

but i will keep checking on that? because i just got the whole mess of error alerts and crashes again today it was how ever after i had edited and used the case checker and moved and added and album art to several hundred songs. which tells me it is getting fixed a little at a time with each updated version.

i think it might still be the way monkey interacts with acess? since i don't have that then monkey needs to add the files for acess that it uses if it puts in an old file or does not put in an old enough file for win98 that might be the cause of it then.

i do have the windows troubles show up on this xp just not as much because it is a faster cpu and has more ram and is made with the newer hardware that might be needed by access?

like i said though i will go back in to the advanced uninstaller and look around for unused drivers, i also use an registry cleaner and other repair software to keep that 98 working so i look around with them too..

but i am not getting any memory dumped files only a few tv out dumped messages being added to the config sys on my win 98.

but they have nothing to do with sound and the tv is not even hooked up so all that from the ati all in wonder is unused.

roving cowboy / keith hall.

As a followup to rusty's post on my problem with pamondrv.sys, let me add some color to this whole mess.

If you are having the errors with crashes/lockups here are some potential tips to trap the offending drivers exes etc. I worked to find the cursed little bad driver above for a long time. I assume(that asssume thingy again) that if you have read this far you are more than a little frustrated with this crash thing.

Before I go further let me say this. Buggy drivers are not a symptom of bad software, after all Microsoft and Linus writers have to put out fixes regularly. The particular packages I downloaded/purchased where new so they might have been fixed by now. None the less I had problems with this particular software package and had uninstalled it, but for an unknown reason this driver was left in the system and registry??? To add frustration to it, the offending driver was not reported via the normal Windows driver reports, i.e. Computer Management. Maybe because some of it's associated registry entries had been removed prior making it"Invisible".I had written and sent crash reports, debugger reports the whole enchilada but could not find the problem. This being said I was very frustrated as all of you reading this probably are too. So this is what I did and found some of the problems plaguing MM. The most annoying characteristic, i.e. my system locking up and crashing has been radically improved. Granted ther are some problems in MM remaining but Rusty and the rest of the MM core group are aware of them and I am sure they are working diligently to get them fixed pronto....

These steps should all be functional in W2K and above. Sorry rovingcowboy but it has been a while since I worked in 98 so I son't know if they will be functional in your sytem, but maybe they incorporated these items in earlier Windows.


1. setup your system to write a COMPLETE MEMORY DUMP. This is done via... start/setting/contol panel/system/advance/startup and recovery. There should be a pulldown box with 3 choices. USE COMPLETE MEMORY DUMP! Reason.... if machine crashes it many times points to the offending driver/module. Furthermore with the complete dump the system will stay either permanently at that screen till you reset or it will count thru 99 which will afford you time to see and write the info displayed.

The complete dump is written to root directory of your OS. Simply titled MEMORY.DMP. This is usually /WINNT or /WINDOWS directory.

Now for the semi-bad news. This file is only interpreted by WINDBG.EXE. this is a free program from MS at their developers site. Before you go rushing off to find it, this little bit of info. As with most MS developer tools this program is more than a little bit daunting to setup and use. So if you wish to proceed, do read the docs, well at least as much as you can stand till you eyes begin to glaze over. Very Long! Whole program with a ton of extras is called DEBUGGING TOOLS FOR WINDOWS.

2. Now here is the ace in the hole. I had forgotten about it, having last used several years ago. There is a file in all versions of Windows, since at least W2k, called VERIFIER.EXE. It is again located in the windows directory. Mine is W2K so....\WINNT\system32\verifier.exe. It is a GUI module with several pages and can be executed via command line or directly pointing at it and clicking.

STOP!!!! PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE PROCEEDING!!!

STOP!!!! PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE PROCEEDING!!!

While this thing can go a long way to resolving the crash problems let me add this WARNING!!!

You can get yourself in trouble with it too. So here is a primer on it's use. What VERIFIER does in a nutshell is take a chunk of existing memory and make a very tightly controlled environment. All the drivers that you select via the GUI are made to operate within this memory block. So obviously a slower machine(processor) and or less memory make this app run like mollases in January. This can make even the boot to your desktop( depending on the number of TSR programs to be loaded at boot) slower, more frustrating and painful than waiting for an Ex girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse to apologise.In my particular case I took virtually all the open drivers displayed in the GUI and ran them en-masse. I am running W2K on a 2600+ processor with 1G of 3200DDR on a dual bus system. Even at that I could go and potentially brew a pot of coffee if I asked MM to retag say 100-200 files. Get the message. If you don't want your frustration level to reach bad proportions and am unsure how much your machine can handle with unreasonable waits, DON'T SELECT TOO MANY DRIVERS THE FIRST TIME OUT.

1. I recommend downloading some background from MS for you to read first of all. Again long and eye glazing. If this ain't you stick then try this.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=244617

Start VERIFIER.EXE by either point and click or via \start\run and type in "verifier" , w/o quotes.

Up comes the GUI. Go to "Setting". Here are all the loaded drivers currently running on the system. If you want the drivers to display start the program or programs prior to starting VERIFIER. The list will be large. If you readily see and know drivers that have not caused problems because you have had them operating for a period of time on your system, you can start by not loading them. But ideally you would like to have all of them interacting to find the real culprit because maybe it hates one of the good ones that you don't suspect. Again this whole process can be time consuming.

At this point if your feeling adventerous just select "VERIFY ALL DRIVERS", then click "PREFERRED SETTINGS" and then "APPLY". When you clicked on "Preferred settings" you noticed that the boxes in the right corner got marked. Here is the rub. When you leave Verifier you are told to reboot. At this point verifier is started and will never turn off until you reenter the VERIFIER GUI and reverse the setting exactly as you set them up. I don't care if you reboot 50 times verifier will stay running till you reverse things via the GUI. So here is the problem I had and you may have. Preferred settings turned on i/o verification. This made my machine bomb during boot on a MS driver and I had (as you will have to) to go into safe mode and open the GUI in VERIFIER and shut off the I/O verification switch. This can be different in every application. Sometimes you can find a workaround and still get the system to bootutilizing all the preferred settings.

What happens during run times with verifier on is that you may get a number of error flags via a pop-up window. These may or not be serious but if you have a clue what or where your system is crashing, go to that app and try everything to make the crash occur as it regularly does. If the offending driver is loaded the system will crash to the dreaded blue screen and a memory dump will occur and in simple english the offending module will probably be revealed. In my case I did this several times with the driver talked about earlier being "ratted" out by verifier.

Needless to say this can and probably will find some things that have been plaguing your system for a while. this is only a quick and clean version of all that Verifier does, so read the docs for more info.

So here's to good RATTING. Hope you find your offending driver and get it off your system.

"Nocreek"

Jeff Crawford

Just a brief fyi: in the case of nocreek, the problems were found to have been caused by pamondrv.sys (a file left behind by an acronis product), which seems to interfere with the Jet database engine.

-Rusty

so that makes sense i also got the songs playing twice, i also did try it with out real time and still got the errors. it would have to be something to do with memory, and the multiple playlists would hog memory.

it is not another program it is in fact monkey running the sound player twice?

here it is

whom ever reported that they heard double playlists starting up.

i have confirmed it. i am getting the same thing. i have been closing monkey with an empty playlist but i did not this last time and i also got the double playlists.

i think this explains the making threads when not playing.
also playing the songs twice. and other errors that seem to be along the same line including the en mass errors i been reporting on for months.

as playing double playlists will eat up all the memory and cause all the above errors. just why it is not playing sound on that first playlist is unknown.
but it is playing the playlist it had when you closed monkey the last time.

i use monkeys playlists but i control them with pekes scripts although i don't think it is pekes code that is doing it as there are too many other's with the memory style errors.

i have sent email to you rusty. trying to explaine it for you a little more.

i posted with your names so you would be more inclined to read it faster.

here is what is going on with monkey,

i know not what is the reason it does this but this is what is going on.

1
monkey hogs memory on start up. and keeps it when not needed for some reason.

2.

when editing monkey is trying to open some program for some reason.
and when it trys to open the program there is no memory and the canvas doe's not allow / can not draw alert's pop up by the hundreds.
i presume it is showing one alert for every thing that needs drawn on the screen and can not be drawn.

what is doing this is monkey. it is no other program that is doing this.


A; Reason i know this and just found this out.

a 1. i have been having no trouble for the last couple weeks when i run the msagent program called djamp.

a 2. i have several scripts running all day and the msagent djamp program.

(msagent = microsoft agents, = cartoon characters you can have interact on the screen with you and the computer by way of doing comic stuff or usefull stuff of starting programs or being a virtural dee jay. and saying the songs and names. msagents have a computer voice.)

there is no trouble when running that program. or the scripts
none that is from monkey anyway. or that will mess with monkey.

the thing that happened is this. i had shut the script i use to run all day as a little msagent screen clown that makes no noise and does not speak, i only use it to keep the msagent server running all the time.

i had also shut down media monkey to add in more songs to the computer.
when i started monkey up i had not closed djmap so it was already running no trouble from it as normal i then played songs on the playlist all was going normal and working fine.

then all the canvas does not allow drawing errors showed up again
i was not even touching the keyboard or mouse and it was just running the nomral stuff as it did all morning.
there was nothing going on any different then before i shut it down?

except
i had not started that msagent script to run my little clown i was going to leave it off.

then i seen that the script i use for a screen saver that plays a bouncing ball msagent across the screen was trying to start. at it was time for it to start.

and that is when the errors started.

so knowing that djamp has to start and stop the server that runs the msagents.
and the djamp was not using the msagent dee jay at the time of the crash.

then the server for the msagent was trying to start to run the screen saver and it could not get any memory.

how do i know it was the msagents server trying to start.

simple
i had to restart monkey but this time i started the little clown script that runs all the time and keeps the agent's server running.

and then started monkey and then sat there and waited for the screen saver to run again..
bingo no more alerts.
so it was the fact that the server was trying to start, and monkey did not let it.

it is in the other room i just checked and the screen saver has been run several times now and still there are no more error alerts.

since i started the script to keep the agent's server running first before i started monkey then monkey could only grab so much ram and as long as i leave it running then monkey can't get the ram the agent server uses.


4.
so the trouble is the fact monkey hogs all the memoy and refuses to release some for other programs that need some to start.


now what program / programs, does monkey try and start when you are doing editing of song's properties or when your working with your database information?

which ever that is and how ever many it trys to open one of them will not get memory that it needs and crash monkey.

that is what it is doing but you have to figure out why? i can't? i been lucky in finding out this stuff but i can not do code?

roving cowboy / keith hall.

just reaching over the fence to post on the board.

no its even older nocreek i am using win98 but i get the same errors on winMe.

the memory leak seems to be an option setting in the tclock program so i turned it off.

but i sure am glad you posted your getting the same thing i am and on a different os. as you can tell i been going nuts trying to find the cause of this.
but it does not seem to be the real time like i thought since it is doing it in the default priority.

roving cowboy / keith hall.

just a leaning over the fence rail again.

Jiri

I sent a brand new capture to bug report after I made first post. I am able to reproduce error without fail anytime I am doing volume leveling. I stated in bug report that I have not found any system failures, i.e. MS Bugcheck crashes or screen rewrite errors/lockups if during any boot/reboot I do not use MM. Anytime I use MM I may experience the above problems either within MM or very soon after exiting or if switching across programs while having MM in background. So as I stated earlier I assume (remember assume) that the offending module is launched by MM. As an aside I have not really noticed any significant change in memory usage patterns while in or after leaving MM, unlike the problem Cowboy has had. I am running W2K Pro where Cowboy I guess is using 98SE which may account for the mem leakage problem.????

Jeff

Did you e-mail the debug log you captured?

Jiri