PT 2019.12 - the code execution cannot proceed, icuin62.dll not found

[Darryl Ramm]

Thanks for posting, that may help others.

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There is something somewhere what wants that DLL and you were just somehow triggering it. Again I'm suspicious of locale stuff. but thinking about this more... did this error happen before plugins start to load or around when they are starting to load... if the later then it maybe a plugin (or framework like JUCE) is calling a DLL directly, maybe a vendor did not realize that DLL is not in earlier versions of Pro Tools. And that code was getting called for some weird reason... which might happen again.

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And going down a deeper rat hole... You could try scanning plugins looking to see if they directly link to this library. It's maybe a very long shot but I'd be curious if any of your plugins show direct linking to that dll... if this was happening around the time the DLL was loading.

I'd have to think about windows more but in a few minutes: quick scan on a mac looking for any dynamically linked from a plugins on a vanilla install of 2020.3 shows no direct plugin use of the equivalent to that .dll library. I don't have my system with lots of plugins installed with me. Here is the super quick and dirty test on macOS:

find '/Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/Plug-Ins' -regex '.*Contents/MacOS/.*' -type f -exec otool -L {} \; -print | grep icu

.. which returns nothing on a simple install with no additional plugins.

But that is a simple static list, it might not catch all DLLs. (edit: doh it will miss the framework inclusions... I'll fix that).

FWIW 2020.3 and 2020.5 on macOS both include the full suite of icu libraries: under /Applications/Pro Tools.app/Contents/Frameworks/

libicudata.62.1.dylib
libicudata.62.dylib
libicui18n.62.1.dylib
libicui18n.62.dylib
libicuuc.62.1.dylib
libicuuc.62.dylib

On 2019.6 they are not there. All that is there are;

libicudataAvid.42.1.dylib
libicui18nAvid.42.1.dylib
libicuucAvid.42.1.dylib

And the only libraries the default plugins link to are benign looking, except the facebook 360 plugins (which I normally all delete).

$ find '/Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/Plug-Ins' -regex '.*Contents/MacOS/.*' -type f -exec otool -L {} \; | grep dylib | sort -u
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1226.10.1)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1252.250.1)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1252.50.4)
/usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 120.1.0)
/usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 400.9.0)
/usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 400.9.4)
/usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 228.0.0)
/usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 104.1.0)
@rpath/libFB360-PluginShell-ambiX.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)

If I get time later I'll have a peek at a Windows install.

[junkgear]

Which version of Windows 10 are you running; Home, Pro, N?
Did you install the latest update (2004) for Windows 10?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by junkgear

Which version of Windows 10 are you running; Home, Pro, N?
Did you install the latest update (2004) for Windows 10?

What has this got to do with a dll not present in an Avid installer?

[junkgear]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

What has this got to do with a dll not present in an Avid installer?

Unless it's something else, the icuin dlls are part of the Windows SDK and are used for Unicode compatibility. Just trying to determine if something on his system changes recently that might break this.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by junkgear

Unless it's something else, the icuin dlls are part of the Windows SDK and are used for Unicode compatibility. Just trying to determine if something on his system changes recently that might break this.

Windows includes icu libraries yes, but what Windows SDK or product includes icuin62.dll?

Other icu libraries are installed, I am not aware of icuin62.dll being provided by Microsoft, not with that versioned library name, and FWIW the current version if icuin.dll bundled in Windows 10 seems to be 64.

icuin62.dll might be installed explicitly on some Windows systems because installed software uses it and those installers added it (like Pro Tools bundles in later versions).

Pro Tools.exe in later versions (like 2005.5) links to icuin62.dll from Pro Tool's DFW.dll. Uh looks like somebody at Avid decided to hard link the version dependency, generally not what I would hope. It'll work since they likely assumed it's all self contained in their bundle, and maybe there was a version specific reason here and/or Avid developers wanted to avoid name collision/confusion with the Windows distributed icuin.dll.

My wild ass guesses are either

1. It's a plugin--a third party or Avid plugin developer linked to this icuin62.dll, without realising it would break on older installs (and they should not be doing this anyhow, and oh please stop hard coding version numbers).
- or -
2. It's Pro Tools--code escaped early into that Pro Tools release from future release work and that code assumed the dll was there. Might even be as simple as a bad build environment causing icuin62.dll to override icuin.dll

Knowing if this error happened as plugins were loading might be a useful clue.

... and in both cases clearly something unusual has to trip off that code to try to call this library. That might be as simple as trying to display or log an unrelated message. If that error message does not need to be displayed or logged the library is never called. My suspicion is the problem is still there and could be tripped off again. (We won't talk about the easter egg code fragments that were accidentally left in a large software vendor's product that tried to print a fun English easter egg text message and was not localized properly and crashed released products using a non-English UI).

[junkgear]

I totally agree with your reasoning Darryl and one of those scenarios is probably tripping it up. I only bring up the upgrade because I know some versions of Windows, like the N version do not contain things like the media feature pack, which PT uses. And, after doing an update like the recent 2004 update, these features need to be reinstalled. Maybe it’s not the cause, but it could have removed a hard coded Avid dependency.

[Darryl Ramm]

I have more ideas on how to check this on Windows, so if folks see this error again PM me and I’ll give you a script to run.