We have one silverlight application that will crash Internet Explorer 8 and 9 with a division by zero error in npctrl.dll only when IE is run on a VM and the silverlight version is 5 (silverlight 4 doesn't crash on the VMs) . When we run IE with silverlight 5 on "bare" metal PC's and Servers we can not reproduce the crash. We've tested this with Workstation 8 and vShere 4 and 5 using Windows 2008 R2 servers and Windows 7 all 64bit.
The crashes don't occurr everytime, sometimes it take dozens of attempts to reproduce, they tend to occur when rapidly moving between tabs or when large record counts are returned to things like pull down lists.
Has anyone had similar issues with silverlight 5? Could this be a driver issue? I didn't see anything in the KB or download that looked relevant.
Looks like a silverlight problem to me. We don't experience problems with silverlight 5 at the moment.
Does the crash happen immediately?
When tripped it crashes immediately. It only happens with one particular silverlight app of ours, but we can't reproduce it out side of a VMware VM.
I can easily reproduce this on a vmware VM of Windows 2008 Server with a small test application.
The problem CANNOT be reproduced on physical hardware - only on vmware virtual machines.
It seems to be related to Silverlight applications using the so-called "client" network stack.
Sample project located here: http://www.siklos.ca/bugs/SLClientStackCrash.zip
References:
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9382809/silverlight-5-debugging-npctrl-dll-crash/9812801#9812801
The problem also happens in Chrome and Firefox.
We are seeing it as well on Workstation 8. If we run it from a physical server no problems. Next step is to try Virtual PC.
Have you entered a support ticket with VMware?
Thank you,
Kevin
I don't pay vmware for support, so they say that I can only enter bugs using these forums.
Regardless, I think the bug is with Silverlight, since they are the ones who are dividing by zero.
I suggest you vote for the MS Connect issue I referenced in my last post. Further, if you have any relationship with Microsoft, you could use that to bump the priority of the issue (which is probably very low at the moment).
Thank you for the info! I will vote it up!
I have an open issue with Microsoft, it does look like their issue. Silverlight is trying to monitor download speeds to adjust buffer size, when it crashes the start and end times for download it timed are the same, so to figure the buffer they must be dividing by end time - start time. That's what I have from MS so far, no fix or ETA for one yet.
Thank you for the update!
We finally migrated our VM's to virtualbox and we haven't seen the problem.
Martin
Microsoft reported to us that a fix for this was included as part of the MS13-022 security release. You can download it at this link below.
Are you still seeing issues after applying the patch from Microsoft? Is anyone? If so, what other options have you tried to resolve the issue?