[Ifeffit] Demeter will not start without admin permissions

[Jason Gaudet]

Hi all,

I came across another Demeter startup issue that seems different from the
mingw and perl conflicts previously discussed, and I'm pretty stumped.

System: Demeter 0.9.10 on Windows 7 32bit

Issue: All Demeter apps (dathena.bat, dartemis.bat, etc.) will no longer
run as a user.  Apps will only run when opened as an administrator.  Trying
to open as a user causes cmd window and splash screen to pop up and
instantly disappear.  No "compatibility mode" seems to help.  The problem
seemed to pop up sometime between August 2 and August 8, after upgrading to
0.9.10, but I downgraded to 0.9.0 and the problem persisted, so (likely)
something changed in my Windows environment and not Bruce's software.

The log:

Can't load 'C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/
auto/Ifeffit/Ifeffit.dll' for module Ifeffit: load_file:Invalid access to
memory location at C:/strawberry/perl/lib/DynaLoader.pm line 200.
 at C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/Demeter.pm line 36
Compilation failed in require at C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/Demeter.pm
line 36.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/Demeter.pm
line 36.
Compilation failed in require at
C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/Demeter/UI/Athena.pm line 5.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at
C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/Demeter/UI/Athena.pm line 5.
Compilation failed in require at C:\strawberry\perl\site\bin\dathena.bat
line 25.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at
C:\strawberry\perl\site\bin\dathena.bat line 25.

I exchanged a few Emails with Bruce before realizing this is a bit more
complex than I thought.  We've thus figured out (I think)

- Explicitly giving myself full permissions to
C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib/auto/Ifeffit/ and %APPDATA%/demeter has no
effect.
- Although I have a cygwin version of perl, demeter is calling up the right
one each time.  Invoking perl with the full path in e.g. dathena.bat has no
effect.

I suspect the problem might not be in perl or any of Bruce's code, but in
some behavior of ifeffit that was previously condoned by Windows but now
requires elevated permissions.  I understand ifeffit is written in
fortran90 but I don't know if there's any aspect of it that might be
affected by recent MS Visual C++ updates I've done on my laptop.  (MS
Visual C++ 2008 x86 9.0.30729.17 and MS Visual C++ 2010 x86 10.0.30319).
I'm pretty sure MSVC2008 coincides with the time Demeter stopped working
but it could just be a coincidence.  There are also of course various
security updates I can't easily sort through.

I was hoping Matt might be able to point me in the right direction here; I
don't know the inner workings of IFEFFIT and I might be far off track
already.

Thanks,

Jason
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