debuggingvb6office365visual-studio-6

Visual Studio 6 debugger returns Exception Code:c0000005, after office 365 installation


After the installation of Office 365 on a Windows 7 PC, the Visual Studio 6 (VB6) debugger returns an error.
+ When you add a breakpoint and try to start debugging (F5) your code, the error pops right away.
+ Without breakpoint the error comes after clicking a button on a form.

The returned Exception Code: c0000005:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BEX
Application Name: VB6.EXE
Application Version: 6.0.97.82
Application Timestamp: 403acf6c
Fault Module Name: StackHash_7e3b
Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
Fault Module Timestamp: 00000000
Exception Offset: 07ba32ac
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Data: 00000008
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.4
Locale ID: 2060
Additional Information 1: 7e3b
Additional Information 2: 7e3beb1e9ccf6d519c5b994ca59a280f
Additional Information 3: 2ac0
Additional Information 4: 2ac004046dc496f347320c8826a4cbdc

Creating an exe file still works and the created exe file still works fine.

Any testimony of a working office 365 - visual studio 6 combination is helpful as it allows me to look for other (indirect) causes of the problem.


Solution

  • I don't have enough points to comment, so...

    I'm a long time VB6 user and it has always been my experience that installing any version of Office from MS will usually cause severe problems with Visual Studio 6. This goes a long way back and I believe it is due to the thousands of changes that Office makes to the registry.

    I have had some success fixing this problem in the past by:

    1. Uninstall Office - reboot
    2. Uninstall VS6 - reboot
    3. Do a full registry clean (repeated runs with CCleaner or similar until there are no more issues detected)
    4. Install Office - reboot
    5. Install VS6 last

    Cleaning the registry is the most important part. Office leaves behind a huge number of obsolete registry entries when uninstalled. Even though a full clean will catch a lot of them, it won't catch anywhere near all of them, so these orphan entries can still cause problems.

    With at least with one version of Office, this process still didn't help. I was never able to use VS6 without problems again until I did a full OS reinstall without Office. Another version caused the VB6 IDE to crash immediately when opened, rendering it useless.

    My ultimate solution was to ditch MS Office for OpenOffice. Since then, I've never had any problems with VS6 at all.

    So the short of it is that MS Office and VS6 are not compatible, especially if VS6 is installed first.

    (On a couple of occasions, I took snapshots of the registry before and after installing Office. One version (2007 I think) made over 12,000 changes to the registry. A later version (possibly 2012) made over 16,000 changes.)