The latest ATI catalyst drivers fail with a debugger active?

[Repo Man]

[EDIT: this is no longer a rant. I discovered the real culprit. This is explained in my last post to the thread.]

I had to reinstall Windows XP from scratch today. I have an ATI video card, so I downloaded the latest Catalyst drivers from ATI (version 4.10). I spent the entire day re-installing all of my software and development enviroment.

This evening, I ran Visual Studio to do some work on a Direct3D / Video application I am developing for a client. When I ran the app in the debugger, I got an alert dialog with this message:

"Protection Error

Debugger detected - please close it down and restart!

Windows NT users: Please note that having the WinIce/SoftIce service installed means that you are running a debugger!"

Pressing "OK" kills the application process.

I tracked this alert down. It gets displayed when my app tries to instantiate a Direct3D surface.

[EDIT: The error occurs at the described time, but ATI is apparently not to blame.]

[DCrazy]

Well, considering that a debugger by necessity hooks into Windows and a driver can detect that, I'd say your only bet is to talk to ATI about it.

[MehYam]

Crazy if this is true. What are game developers supposed to do? It's either a horrible mistake on their part, or there's some way to deactivate this check.

[Repo Man]

Well, I found some threads through a Google search about this:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=71487
http://www.convertzone.com/dvdsanta/faq.htm#3

The funny thing is that I have had the DivX player on my system for a *long* time and never had any problem with it. I'll try uninstalling that, but still...WTF?

[DCrazy]

Hmm... it's "mistakenly detecting a debugger" that's actually there? What if that mistake was fixed and it STILL bitches at you for using a debugger?

[DigiJo]

you are sure its from the ati-drivers? i heard alot of recent copyprotections from games are installed as hidden drivers and block debbugers. i found this starforce crap on my maschine, and they say it would block winice.

try the omega drivers anyway, they fixed all farcry bugs for me and even some for good ole d3 opengl.

http://www.omegadrivers.net/

[DCrazy]

Read the links that djordan posted above, and you'll see it comes from DivX.

[Repo Man]

I uninstalled the DivX player and its codecs and I got the same problem. So, I spent the entire night and most of this morning reinstalling Windows XP Pro once more so I have a clean slate--well, as clean as you can get with Windows anyway.

I installed service pack 2, my virus software and my development environment. I tested the debugger and made sure everything worked correctly. It did, so I made a system restore point.

Then, I installed the ATI 4.10 drivers. I tested my debugger again and everything still worked. Good, So I made another restore point.

At this juncture, I have bare bones Windows XP installation with SP2, Visual Studio 2003 and the new ATI drivers and everything is hunky dory. Then I began the laborious task of installing each of my applications and testing my debugger...and setting lots of restore points, of course.

I after a couple of hours, I installed the latest version of Nero Burning ROM (V 6.6) and I started getting the error! Eureka! Uninstalling Nero, the error went away. Reinstalling, the error comes back. Uninstalling, the error goes away. Hmmmm...Do I detect a pattern here?

Thank God, it looks like Nero is the offender and not ATI. *whew* Now, I suppose I have to go yell at Nero. Sorry ATI.

It looks as though some mis-behaving, third-party copy-protection SDK is being used by Nero and probably by the DivX folks.

I spent the last two days messing with this. ARRGH! I'm tired and I need to go to bed!

[Repo Man]

I am probably the only one on this board doing video software development, but for anyone's future reference, here is the work-around for my problem. As posted on the MS DirectX Newsgroup...

[quote]
After beating my brains out for the past few days (you probably saw my rant when I originally though ATI caused his problem), I have finally figured-out exactly what was giving me a nasty copy-protection error alert with the Visual Studio debugger. For your reference, the alert was this:

------------------* snip *-------------------------------

Protection Error

Debugger detected - please close it down and restart!

Windows NT users: Please note that having the WinIce/SoftIce service installed means that you are running a debugger!

------------------* snip *-------------------------------

Pressing "OK" kills the application process!

Searching Google, this copy-protection alert is usually associated with an old version of the DivX codec. When instantiated, that codec would display that alert if it detected any kind of debugger running. The DivX people fixed this a long time ago.

Now, however, it looks likes â??Ahead Software,â?