[tex-live] Issue installing Tex Live on Windows 10

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2015-08-05 at 14:43:12 +0200, Siep Kroonenberg wrote:

 > Which dll? As fas as I can see, the only possible TeX Live related
 > suspects would be the perl- and bundled mingw dlls.  But the
 > problem is not universal: I, for one, could not reproduce it.  And
 > if it is an external dll I would not know where to start looking.

I fear that the error message "0xc0000142" isn't very helpful at all.
What does it mean?  Is it documented somewhere?  The link provided by
Michael is absolutely useless because nothing is explained.
The guy found a solution for *his* problem by trial-and-error.  Maybe
"0xc0000142" means that the operating system is currently in the
toilet.  It's known that Windows spends most of the time there.

DLLs are a pain on Windows because they are searched in PATH but their
filenames don't contain the version number.  Let me give an Example.

I installed GNU Octave on Windows many years ago.  It came with a file
called cygwin.dll.  Later I installed Cygwin but it always crashed,
simply because the ancient cygwin.dll was found earlier in PATH.

If you have Unix tools (MinGW, Cygwin) installed, you can easily find
out which DLLs are used by a particular .exe file:

  strings foo.exe | grep -i "\.dll"

It's not 100% reliable but works in most cases.

Writing a script which finds out which DLL is found first in PATH
isn't a big deal, but I have no idea how to determine its version
number.  And I fear that everything gets even more complicated if the
registry is involved.

I have no idea how to debug this issue.

Good night,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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