Run-time error '5': invalid procedure call or argument

[johndallman]

GCA4 has started doing this immediately on being started. I haven't got as far as trying to load a data set, let alone a character. I renamed my gca.ini file to old_gca.ini, but that made no difference. What do I try next?

Thanks,

[Armin]

Maybe uninstall and reinstall?

The hard part is, there are so many things that might cause this. Bad data is one, which you've hopefully skipped by removing the INI from the equation. Another is a control that another program has overwritten or stolen, so that its interface is different. A reinstall might fix that. Might not. Ditto if the program itself became corrupted.

[johndallman]

Will do, after a backup. Is the actual error message simply saying that the run-time interpreter can't find something?

[Armin]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Will do, after a backup. Is the actual error message simply saying that the run-time interpreter can't find something?

No, it's saying that a procedure is being called that doesn't exist in the format being used, or that one of the arguments to a procedure isn't of the right type.

(IIRC, it's also thrown for a few other things, never clearly documented, which sometimes confuses the issue even more.)

This was a hugely common error back when there were way more applications making use of the shared libraries from the pre-.Net era. Some app would install a different version of a shared library that had a different procedure definition, so everything that used the other version suddenly started throwing these errors. The early days of GCA had this problem constantly because HP printer drivers installed older versions of libraries that GCA used, but had marked them as newer versions. It sucked a lot.

Since the tech has largely moved past it, these particular issues aren't seen so much any more, as apps got updated and rebuilt using better foundations.

These days, I think we see this error more often as a 'fall through' when something went wrong elsewhere, and wasn't trapped there, and the results blow up something else.

ETA: Now that I think about it, I believe we have also seen this error pop up when GCA starts when there is a problem with the VB scripting engine that GCA uses for sheets. So it's possible that something happened to that. Hopefully a reinstall will fix that, if so.

[johndallman]

Thanks for the help. I have it going now. The first re-install did no good. For the second, I pulled out all the stops:

• Renamed the directories in Documents and App Data
• Installed outstanding Windows updates and rebooted.
• Reinstalled, and checked GCA ran.
• Gradually moved the stuff from the renamed directories back into the newly created ones (stopping GCA before each change, of course).

Everything I tried moved back without problems, although I stopped before the directory under AppData that holds fastload sets. So I don't know what was wrong, but I think I'll try deleting the fastload sets if it happens again.