[Closed] mysterious platform crash (Stack Overflow)

I'm sorry to tell that it seems nearly impossible to reproduce here on my system.

It crashed just one time the last week, directly after an installation - I think it was the update of SystemExplorer dev test. The Menu just flashed for the split of a second as I clicked the tray icon and was gone. Too fast to see if the refreshing was ongoing (but you don't see it after an installation anyway). There was a flicker of a windows error message (the red circle white cross type), but too fast to be identified...
Maybe I have time to do a thorough test this evening.

A suggestion for one of the next Platform releases: some kind of "active" tray icon that indicates its state may be helpful. I have in mind the PA.com arrow rotating to indicate the Platform is doing something in the background, and a tooltip with something like "refreshing icon list...". I sometimes find it irritating that the menu does not respond even if I know the cause. I know a lot of people who are scared stiff in such cases and think it is broken. Or better: they may have broken something - again.

After various crashes, mostly after installing a new app - but not always - I only just had the chance to see the error message that I could only vaguely guess before. It said "Stack overflow" and stayed for about 15 seconds until the platform vanished with no action taken.
I have Windows XP running for about 2 days now (with some hibernation time now and then) and started the platform from different drives repeatedly (not running parallel, though). I have done a lot of updating, installing and uninstalling as I maintained my repository drive and local installation and synced some settings so many refreshes have been done. It crashed two times in the meantime, once yesterday and once today, leaving the error message readable

Hope that helps... even if it is just a small hint.

I've had portable apps crash a number of times on me. Each time it's after I've installed a number of applications using downloaded installation files; I have always waited till one installation has finished and I've closed the installation dialogue box before trying to install another. The portable apps menu stays visible throughout the updating procedure and I just select install another application without having to use the tray icon. I've got most of the portable apps programs installed and a few others I counted 288 in total.

After the last successful installation I move the cursor back over the portable apps menu to click to install another application and a box appears saying stack overflow and freezes. I'm using Windows 7 and I usually get another message saying that Portable apps has crashed and offers to close the program otherwise I close it myself. If I continue installing applications after restarting, it usually happens again. I haven't noticed that it happens after a specific number of installations. This happened with both the current portable apps and the new 2.0 beta.

That's my experience, too.
What makes it even more critical is that can happen also when the installations are executed by the updater. So when you wait long enough (several weeks) for a couple of apps being ready for update and then run the updater, it crashes after the update run.
I hope that will be fixed when the new app directory is implemented or it would break that for the affected computers.

I came across this when installing all apps a week ago for validation purposes and reported it to John. It didn't occur to me that it was the same issue as it was here, because I knew precisely what was going wrong in this case: I had the distinct advantage of running it in Wine and so got lots of "err:gdi:alloc_gdi_handle out of GDI object handles, expect a crash" messages in the console (and it did). So I knew immediately that there was a GDI object leak in refreshing the app list. You've confirmed here that these are the same issue; thanks for that.

For testing, Wine is so much more useful than Windows for almost everything. It regularly gives you helpful messages in the console, things like this GDI object leak, or for missing DLLs it'll tell you what it was looking for rather than just "failing to initialise" as Windows will do (and the Dependency Walker won't tend to help for side-by-side assemblies, either - but Wine'll tell you).

Thanks for investigating! Good work.
I can completely confirm that. I further looked at it and it can be brought down to the icon refreshing (as Chris said already). I tested installing (via updater, from the platform or by executing a paf-file) and it has the same effect as refreshing the app list.
That explains why it happens more often with my external hdd. It's simply because I have much more apps installed there. I think Simeon also has a long app list, so his setup is more prone to the bug than a usual installation with just a handful of apps.

More information:
My app repository hdd (a mixture of pafs and other portable apps, totalling 175 folders) starts with 1254 GDI handles and adds about 1200 every refresh, so the bug happens much faster (8 times refresh and bang!). That mislead me to thinking it had something to do with the access speed...
A fresh platform stays the same (around 114 GDI handles), one app installed (7zip for testing) adds 6 GDI handles every refresh. A single exe (unlocker portable for testing) adds 4 GDI handles every refresh - unlocker portable has two exe files in its directory by default and therefore adds 8 handles, deleting one exe reduces it to 4.
So, adding portable apps that are not pafs but contain several exes adds to the problem.
Uninstalling every app makes the handles stay constant again (on the risen number though).

It should be, but as I didn't run into it much myself, I didn't want to assume it was.