NTVDM encountered a hard error

Wednesday, June 13, 2007
I ran across this one today when trying to run a 16-bit application on a Windows 2003 Server. I run the app and it pops up a Windows dialog box saying, "System Error : NTVDM encountered a hard error."

Turns out that the environment path for "TEMP" and "TMP" is invalid. Normally these paths resolve to their 8.3 pathname, so an enviromental variable set to %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temp will resolve to C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\LOCALS~1\Temp. On my problem server the path resolves to C:\DOCUME~1\ADMINI~1\Local Settings\Temp, note the space in Local Settings. This mix of long filenames and 8.3 names is invalid.

To resolve the issue, I changed the user TEMP and TMP variables to use C:\TEMP.
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10 comments:

  1. AnonymousJune 22, 2009 at 9:01 AM

    Thanks for the info. It fixed my issue today.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BenJuly 14, 2009 at 8:51 AM

    Thanks. This was very helpful. I had eliminated the other causes. -BenT

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousDecember 4, 2009 at 4:28 PM

    thanks! (server 2003)

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousDecember 18, 2009 at 12:21 AM

    great one Jeff! worked for me as well....now I do not get the "ntvdm hard error" , but now the command prompt says...."could not execute xyz.exe"....any clues ?

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousFebruary 17, 2010 at 1:52 PM

    Wow....worked like a charm thanks Jeff.....

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousFebruary 24, 2010 at 8:53 AM

    ...."could not execute xyz.exe"....

    the file path name is proablly still too long..you need to move the install file closer to the root of C:


    for example: C:\TEMP\setup.exe

    instead of

    C:\documents and settings\username\desktop\folder\setup.exe

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousSeptember 3, 2010 at 3:49 PM

    You are da man!

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousSeptember 17, 2010 at 7:26 AM

    We had this hard error message when trying to print from a 16 bit program ... turned out to be the wrong printer set as the default. The printer set as default was no longer on the domain...

    ReplyDelete
  9. AnonymousOctober 8, 2010 at 12:25 AM

    I just solved one another variant of this problem. I used ProcessMonitor to find suspicios actions and the steps vere these:
    1.,In registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\VirtualDeviceDrivers there was a reference to virtual drive driver "rnbovdd.dll". This file was not on the drive => clear the value in regedit. This was probably the biggest problem.

    2., In C:\Windows\Fonts the files vga852.fon, vgafixe.fon and vgasyse.fon were missing they are referenced from registry HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\GRE_Initialize. Microsoft says, these files should be in dllcache so I copied them there too. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc939631.aspx
    3., The Path in Environment variables contained one non existing path. This was probably not the major problem, but still I fixed this.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Travis PhillipsNovember 3, 2011 at 7:22 AM

    Thank you for this! I was at a dead end trying to get VB 6 installed on some new servers. This fixed it. It is strange that this doesn't affect the Windows XP boxes. Oh well, I changed the "Local Settings" to "locals~1" and things are great now.

    Thanks for sharing! ^_^

    ReplyDelete

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