Huck's Journal of Sorts

So a friend of mine gave me a copy of American Girls Dress Designer for the PC, and while it seems fine and dandy for the most part, it has this one major flaw, something which accounts for why it fails to run properly on Windows systems post-98/ME: As you can see, using anything that invokes a pop-up window, such as Print, Quit or Select Dress, leads to this error. At first I thought it had something to do with DirectDraw as what some of the lads over at Vogons suggested , but none of the hacks at hand were of any use. Neither does Wine despite my expectations with it being able to run older games with ease. :/ So what I did next was I fired up OllyDbg and got an INVALID_WINDOW_HANDLE error upon reproducing the bug. To further clarify things I used this API debugger and ended up with this: As you can see, the debugger says the application is calling an invalid menu handle - the CreateWindowEx API call allows programmers to define a menu to a window. But since there a...

I once patched my Windows 7 install just after installing, well, to get rid of the annoying "For testing purposes only" nag message that comes with every beta copy of Windows. There are a couple of third-party hacks for this, most of which involves editing a system file named USER32.DLL. You can do it with resource hacking tools, by finding the strings related to the nag message, and then edit them out. Another method involves an automated script to replace the old DLL with a modified one. The problem is that when you try to replace the DLL in Windows 7, applications in compatibility mode crashes. I searched for hours just to find out the fix for this problem, and I nearly got into reinstalling the whole system. As it turns out, the permissions and file ownership have been changed from its default values. Modifying the file will impair compatibility, and causes a conflict of some sort unless if you give them the default permission settings (you can still use the patched user3...