Anyone could help me diagnose this issue? Old program doesn't start as it should

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I've been trying to figure out what's happening to an old program that runs inside a Virtual Machine...
the manufacturer is not there anymore so no official technical support is available.

Could someone here help me diagnose the issue?

The program is related to an access database and it starts when double clicking the icon or so, it shows the splash screen and asks for the user password to grant access to the program itself, but after that the app stays unresponsive. Details below:

What I've seen till now:
1. It looks like that if you start the program in the virtual machine the first time it will not run most of the time.
2. If you end it's process and wait for a while it reacts as it was the first time when you try to start it again and it fails to start.
3. If you end the process and you start it again fast enough then the program starts without issue.

So I ended showing the people who are using it to access the tasks administrator in windows and shutting down tasks... which is not good, but at least they are working...

I have a RedHat Linux to host the data this program is using.
The computers with the Virtual Machine are running Windows 7.
The virtual machine itself is a Windows XP.

Note: The VM computer is running on bridged networking.

Any idea of what could be going on under the hood?

Thank you all!

What I have tried:

I've tried to remove the antivirus and the firewall in the host computer (the VM doesn't have any of those active).
This looked to work a little better, but probably it was only a coincidence.
Can't figure out why it is failing...

Posted 11-Mar-16 22:45pm

Joan M

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OriginalGriff 12-Mar-16 5:15am

Not a QA question - you should post this in the lounge! :laugh:

Joan M 12-Mar-16 5:36am

Good grief...

:D

Albert Holguin 10-Apr-16 20:59pm

If you suspect any networking problems, try using Wireshark to see the data being exchanged between the machines. That would also tell you if there are any firewalls blocking any paths. Aside from that, the application could be failing for any number of reasons. You can always try running it from a debugger, if it was built with debug symbols, it may give you some meaningful feedback, if it wasn't... at least it'll let you know what assembly it failed on (for example, some library that it's using or attempting to use).

Joan M 11-Apr-16 7:36am

Thank you Albert,

I've abandoned all hope...
At the second start the application runs without issue... strange, tedious, but OK...

Albert Holguin 12-Apr-16 22:34pm

Better than nothing... :)

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