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views:

173

answers:

8

I work on windows-based PC applications and have run across issues with Pop-up blockers, Anti-virus and firewall issues breaking my application (some are web applications with ActiveX and others are .NET Winforms)

Listening to our support staff, there are other applications that users install and use that have caused issues with our applications. What unexpected issues have you run across related to incompatible programs with your application and what are the 'offending' applications? (or maybe your application has been one of the 'offenders')

What components/applications do you install in your test systems to ensure that there are not compatibility issues?

+5  A: 

We had lots of trouble with a virus scanner, that blocked tcp connections between local processes.

It took us quite a lot of time, until we found the reason for the blocked connections. Now we put our processes into an exclude list of the scanner, and everything works fine.

koschi
+1  A: 

Internet Explorer.

tloach
A: 

The strangest one that comes to mind is the Logitech webcam driver interfering with Cygwin. I installed a Logitech webcam and my Eclipse-based Altera development environment stopped working. Took quite a while to figure this one out.

Andrew Queisser
+1  A: 

I had some trouble with Dell QuickSet. it's a small and quite stupid utility which comes with every Dell laptop and takes care of the special keys on the laptop keyboard.
Apparently to do that it loads its DLL into every process in the system. With my specific application it caused the userland side of the video driver to crash.

There are quite a few applications which allow themselves to load a DLL into every process in the system. Google desktop comes to mind as a very popular example.
You can see which dlls are loaded to a process simply by attaching a debugger.

shoosh
+1  A: 

Spyware and other malware will sometimes cause unexpected problems with applications. I don't know of any specific issues we've had, but I know checking for/cleaning up spyware is one of the first things our tech support people have users do if they're running into problems.

I've never run into issues with Antivirus software, but I have had problems with firewalls (both software and hardware). Some software firewalls are poorly written and can cause problems even when turned off (looking at you McAffee). Some hardware firewalls/proxies can also cause issues. I believe we had a problem where someone's corporate proxy was filtering the data that went through it, which included modifying payloads if it found "bad" content. Sometimes our (binary) data would trigger that and would get modified, making it invalid by the time it reached the client.

Yahoo Messenger caused some problems with our app one time as well. It used some embedded flash movies to display ads, and something they were doing with Flash was breaking it in other contexts (our Flash app would fail randomly when Yahoo messenger was installed).

Real Player 11 beta also caused a lot of issues with our Flash application (intercepted network communication and broke the protocol in certain instances, among other issues), though I think they ironed them out before the final release.

To expand on Roundcrisis's comment, we did see problems in Vista as well. Depending on what your application actually does, changes made to the OS for Vista could cause problems.

I had to make some significant changes to one of our DLLs to make it work nicely in Vista. Also, the new application security stuff can cause problems with certain types of operations. If you're looking for things you need to test against, definitely test against Vista.

Herms
A: 

We have multiple times problems with HP printer drivers (different models)? The driver lost some text on printing. The effect is reproducible with the same document. An updating of the driver solve it the most cases.

Horcrux7
+1  A: 

Windows Vista? ie6? i m actually not joking

Miau
A: 

Pointsec inadvertently crashed almost every computer in an entire department when it was accidentally deployed. Total nightmare. Had to re-image approx. 50 PC's.

Kolten