Saturday, September 03, 2011

Adobe Flash Builder 4 and Coldfusion Builder crash during startup

Symptom: all of sudden, my Flash Builder 4 and Coldfusion Builder can not be started. They will crash during start. They are running on Eclipse 3.4.2, and 3.5.2 respectively.

Diagnostic: Coldfusion builder simply show me an error dialog without any useful information. It just generically states something like: Visual C++ request application to exit in abnormal way.
Of course, I tried to reset Eclipse and clear it's workspace to no avail.
However, luckily, Flash Builder 4 throws an exception. And I got a chance to start Visual Studio 2010 debugger session on it. Once in Visual Studio debugger, I saw exception type "bad_day_of_month" from boost library. Then I turn to "Stack Trace" tab, and saw callstack: Kernel32->atmlib.dll->UpdateNotifications.dll. A little Google on this end turned up a thread talking about similar problem from other Adobe users. So, I read the thread, it starts to mention how the "UpdateNotification" library will look at Windows Scheduled Tasks for Adobe updater. Then it occurs to me what might be, and later proven to actually be the root cause.

Cause: A few days earlier, in an effort to speed up my computer, I ran "AutoRuns" utility from "System Internals", and disabled a bunch of "Scheduled Tasks". Among them was a task named "AdobeAAMUpdater-1.0......".

Fix: using "AutoRuns" utilities, I turned the "AdobeAAMUpdater-1.0....." scheduled task back on. Then Flash Builder 4 and Coldfusion Builder are all back to normal.