memory issue? Frames below may be incorrect or incomplete - and may crash CVI

[Wolfgang]

Hello NI,

during debugging the Variables and Call Stack window may show up.

Today I encountered a new message: Frames below may be incorrect or incomplete

see the two screenshots below.

Out of curiosity I right clicked the greyed text for help, the result was an error,

followed by a crashed (i.e., disappeared) CVI.

Since this is not an especially large project I checked Task Manager and indeed, the memory consumption of CVI was far from the critical 32 bit limit. (and the PC is running Win 7 64 bit with 64 GB)

So my questions:

- what is a frame in this context, why may it be incomplete?

- could you fix the crashing CVI, please?

Thanks!

[Alpar]

Hi Wolfgang,

Each entry in the Call Stack window represents the frame of a function that has debugging information recognized by the CVI debugger. It can happen that while unwinding the stack the debugger encounters frames that don't have such debugging information. In this case it cannot guarantee the frames are reliably determined, especially in the case of 32-bit applications (where it needs to rely on the frame pointer, which might be omitted for optimized code), hence the message you noticed. I should point out that this message is not new to CVI 2019, it was introduced in CVI 2013 I believe.

I assume your first screenshot is for a callback function you have, called from the CVI runtime engine, which doesn't have debugging information. In the case of the second screenshot the execution is suspended in a function called from SpectrumAdjustTimeScale which again doesn't have debugging information.

Regarding the crash, I'm sorry you encountered it, but I wasn't able to reproduce it, so please provide the steps you did and ideally a simplified version of the project used. Did you right click the grey entry and select Help from the context menu? If so, that is supposed to bring up the help topic for the Variables and Call Stack Window. Does this operation work for other call stack entries or in other dialogs' Help button? I'm asking because in order to show the help CVI uses the HtmlHelp SDK function which uses hhctrl.ocx from the system? Is it possible that got somehow corrupted on your machine and lead to the crash you encountered?

Best regards,

Alpar

[Wolfgang]

Hi Alpar,

Thanks a lot for replying and explaining the meaning of 'frame' to me.

Just to make sure, I am running the debug64 configuration.

To answer your questions:

- yes, I did right click the grey entry and selected Help. The first time I did it I just encountered the shown message, the second time CVI 'disappeared'.

- yes, this operation works fine for other call stack entries, it brings up the help without problems.

Somehow this observation reminded me of my earlier report here.

At this time the problem was 'solved' in the way that your colleague WireWeaver had sent me a compilation of cvi.exe with the /LAA switch. Now, with CVI 2019, I experience the same problem again, so I guess it is the 32 bit issue.

By the way, the CVI help on version could be updated to version 2019, my suggestion two years ago on updating the help was overlooked...