Problem launching a System.Diagnostics.Process under Windows 7

Question

I’m trying to launch an application (Operating System, My Application and the application I want to launch are all 32 bits), from .NET 3.51.

The code that launches the Process is used for other applications, but there’s one that is giving us a headache. If we “double click” on the application’s icon, it works as expected, meaning that it works fine as an application in the computer. Double clicking the .exe directly, also works.

The operating system is Windows 7 32Bits (Home and/or Professional).

Our .NET application is compiled with x86 to avoid problems.

The code that launches “Processes” is located inside a DLL (also 32 bits) made by us, basically it’s a simple DLL that holds some “Common Code” across the board, common methods, functions and stuff we use throughout our code. One of those methods look like this:

public static bool FireUpProcess( Process process, string path, bool enableRaisingEvents,
        ProcessWindowStyle windowStyle, string arguments )
    {
        if ( process != null )
        {
            try
            {
                process.StartInfo.FileName = @path;
                if ( arguments != null )
                {
                    if ( arguments != String.Empty )
                    {
                        process.StartInfo.Arguments = arguments;
                    }
                }
                process.StartInfo.WindowStyle = windowStyle;
                process.EnableRaisingEvents = enableRaisingEvents;
                process.Start();
            }
            catch
            {
                try
                {
                    process.Kill();
                }
                catch ( InvalidOperationException )
                {
                } // The process is not even created

                return false;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    }

I don’t know who wrote this method, but it has been working for roughly six years with different applications, therefore I assume it’s “ok”. However, we have a customer with a piece of software that won’t launch when passed through that argument.

The arguments are:

1. process is a System.Diagnostics.Process created with a simple "new Process();”
2. path is a full path to the .exe “c:/path/to/my.exe”.
3. enableRaisingEvents is false
4. windowStyle is Maximized (but have tried others).

It gives a crappy MessageBox… which I have happily immortalized. It’s in spanish but the translation ought to be easy:

It says:

Application Error An unexpected exception has occurred for the program (0x0eedfade) at …

Googling that 0x0eedfade gives strange results that look scary, but the truth is, if I go to the .exe that I’m trying to launch and double click it, it works perfectly.

For The Record: If I try to launch other things (I.e.: Notepad.exe, Adobe Acrobat Reader) it works, but Firefox doesn’t open and doesn’t show an error.

This “some work, some doesn’t” behavior leads me to believe that there might be a problem with a Windows 7 security mechanism or similar that I don’t know.

What am I missing or doing wrong?

Answer 1

If the exe has a manifest, you should set UseShellExecute to true on the process object before you call Start. It's not a bad idea in any case.

Answer 2

You are not setting the process.StartInfo.WorkingDirectory property. There's plenty of poorly written software out there that assumes the working directory will be the directory in which the EXE is stored. At least add this line:

 process.StartInfo.WorkingDirectory = System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName(@path);

The exception is however rather strange. I'd definitely recommend you tell the customer to update their anti-malware tools.