I ran across this one today when trying to run a 16-bit application on a Windows 2003 Server. I run the app and it pops up a Windows dialog box saying, "System Error : NTVDM encountered a hard error."
Turns out that the environment path for "TEMP" and "TMP" is invalid. Normally these paths resolve to their 8.3 pathname, so an enviromental variable set to %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temp will resolve to C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp. On my problem server the path resolves to C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\Local Settings\Temp, note the space in Local Settings. This mix of long filenames and 8.3 names is invalid.
To resolve the issue, I changed the user TEMP and TMP variables to use C:\TEMP.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
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6 comments:
Thanks for the info. It fixed my issue today.
Thanks. This was very helpful. I had eliminated the other causes. -BenT
thanks! (server 2003)
great one Jeff! worked for me as well....now I do not get the "ntvdm hard error" , but now the command prompt says...."could not execute xyz.exe"....any clues ?
Wow....worked like a charm thanks Jeff.....
...."could not execute xyz.exe"....
the file path name is proablly still too long..you need to move the install file closer to the root of C:
for example: C:\TEMP\setup.exe
instead of
C:\documents and settings\username\desktop\folder\setup.exe
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