Troubleshooting a 'Needle in a Haystack'

After returning from a 3 week vacation in the USA I found out that there was something terribly wrong with my DigiWaiter Server setup file...
2 people reported they had an error starting the program:
Application has generated an exception that could not be handled

At first I thought it had something to do with the .net 1.1. framework but it turned out they had it installed and it was functioning alright.

I tested the server installation on approx 3 different machines (2000 and xp) and after that I draw the conclusion that my setup package was ok.

Now I had to figure out what was wrong, the 'application has ...' message is very common and it's very hard to determine what is causing this.

I installed the DWS on a machine of which I thought it resembled the machines of the users reporting the error.
It was a windows 2000 machine with nothing fancy installed..

I got the same error message and I was more or less 'happy I got it too', this gave me the opportunity to figure things out myself without having to ask the people who reported the errors..

Errors on client machines are hard to debug since there's no debugger on the client!
However if you copy the following files to the clients application folder:
cordbg.exe
cordbg.exe.config
msvcr71.dll
msvcp71.dll
msdis140.dll

And press 'cancel' at the error message the debugger will start and shows you more info!

You can download these files from:
http://www.dolesoft.com/downloads/DolesoftDebugger.exe

To make a long story short, it turned out that DWS needs the mdac 2.6 or higher (machine I tested on had 2.53) and I didn't include a license file for the crystal report engine that comes with the DWS suite.

I fixed it all so everything should be ok now, it's a shame that hundreds of people might have downloaded a program which didn't work for them.
I guess they installed it, got the error and just uninstalled it (which I would do ;)), I'm happy these 2 users reported it!

Take care and beware,

Mike