PuTTY semi-bug winhelp-crash

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summary: Context help causes WinHelp crash after PuTTY help files upgraded
class: semi-bug: This might or might not be a bug, depending on your precise definition of what a bug is.
difficulty: taxing: Needs external things we don't have (standards, users etc)

Invoking context help from within Windows PuTTY after the PuTTY help files on a system have been replaced has been observed to cause WinHelp to crash.

Since the crash occurs in winhelp.exe, it's almost certainly a WinHelp bug, but perhaps there is something we can do to avoid triggering it. We're out of ideas, though.

The symptoms I observed (on Win98SE, and also on 2000 when I had access to it, IIRC) were:

The precise crash (on Win98SE at least) is: "WINHLP32 caused an invalid page fault in module WINHLP32.EXE at 0167:004099ba." (A Google Groups search finds an apparently unrelated reference, so it's not just us.)

Things I've tried, in desperation:

March 2019: this is now moot, as we no longer ship the .HLP file (since vuln-chm-hijack).


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Audit trail for this semi-bug.
(last revision of this bug record was at 2019-03-18 22:27:45 +0000)