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Locating the source of managed exceptions that aren't coming directly from my code?

Asked 2010-09-05T15:01:02.933
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I apologize in advance if this is really a Super User question... I just wasn't sure, but this seems more on the dev. side than on the tech support side. :)

This isn't necessarily a problem, but it does actually drive me totally bonkers on my system. It also only happens on my computer.

When I launch any application, even a blank WPF application, I see four exceptions:

A first chance exception of type 'System.IO.DirectoryNotFoundException' occurred in PresentationCore.dll
A first chance exception of type 'System.ArgumentException' occurred in mscorlib.dll
A first chance exception of type 'System.ArgumentException' occurred in mscorlib.dll
A first chance exception of type 'System.InvalidOperationException' occurred in PresentationCore.dll

To figure out where these are coming from, I then set VS2008 to break on any thrown CLR exceptions, and here is the information:

Exception #1:
Cannot find a part of the path 'D:\Dell\Reader2.0\SPLASH.SYS\fonts\AscenderUni.ttf'.

Exception #2:
Culture name 'ug' is not supported.
Parameter name: name

Exception #3:
Culture name 'ug' is not supported.
Parameter name: name

Exception #4:
There is no registered CultureInfo with the IetfLanguageTag 'ug'.

I've poked through Process Monitor and Process Explorer. Process Monitor shows that my application is doing a RegQueryValue, which I'm certainly not responsible for... but some DLL (presumably from Dell crapware) is getting loaded by my process and is reading this regkey. I then looked at Process Explorer, hoping to see which DLLs my application is loading, but can't find that info. I then tried PrcView and saw the modules my application was loading.

I was surprised to see how many other modules were getting loaded, but I didn't see anything Dell related. I'm also wondering how it is possible that a Norton Internet Se

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1 Answer

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It is very unlikely to be the shovel-ware on your machine. These DLLs need to inject themselves also into non-managed programs, they have to be written in a language that doesn't depend on the CLR, like C or C++. And accordingly cannot generate managed exceptions.

These exceptions look like machine configuration problems to me. Junk in your registry. The bad culture name (sounds like "us" got corrupted to "ug") generates three of them, the font is probably listed in the registry but missing from the disk.

Short from a OS reinstall, you could possibly diagnose this by using both ProcMon and the debugger. Use Debug + Exceptions, Thrown checkbox to force the debugger to stop on the first-chance exception. When it hits, switch to ProcMon, the registry key or file should be visible very near the end of the trace.

answered 2010-09-05T16:33:45.983

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