This may look obvious to you 'cos you're the author but I have to admit this is pretty confusing for me.


Using both, yesterday's and today's version of PP with the zip version of Firefox.
I can see clearly, the D:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla is being properly redirected but Firefox doesn't start at all ( tried several times, logged off as you said )

D:\WINDOWS\Fonts isn't redirected ( Power Tab Editor )

I tested a couple of other applications ( less known ), file system redirection is working properly but the applications themselves are not.
I tried sanboxie but failed miserably ( I've got to admit, there are several exe(s) there and the only one that is creating something is the "control.exe" but when I try to run IE sandboxed, it doesn't start but I can see the process being sandboxed)

I am reporting what I have been testing, I am not requesting anything. I just want to help you getting further with the application.
I hope I am in compliance with what you stated above, if not feel free to tell.

Just tried the new version of PortaPotty on xplorer2 with some serious issues. For one, when I tried to exit xplorer2 it never fully closed, just used up 100% cpu. Also, though there was no portapotty-created .ini present, it was using my (registry) settings. Have not tried with a program involving directory handling (will check Scorched3D soon), but it seems the registry bit is a bit broken from my end, at least as far as I can tell. It also seems that tabbyFile is giving me access violations when I try to view the xplorer2 folder after the above test with xplorer2, but no other folders are affected. Other file managers have no problem, so I suppose this might be a conflict with tabbyFile itself. It's curious that tabbyFile read the folder fine before, and is messing up now though. Regardless, I doubt your application is at fault, seeing as how tabbyFile has plenty of little "quirks."

I'll edit this post once I get a chance to play around with some other applications.

_________________
How much Keefe is in this movie? Miles O' Keefe!

tabbyFile gave me the same thing, but only the first time i ran it, afterwards, i ran it another 2-3 times with no errors, was odd, but yeah,

also, just a note, im running my programs through Pstart, it makes it ALOT easyer to test alot of programs at once, but it may skew my results,

with the 8/27 build, i ran into very few errors, it was Slow (:P), but, i only had one program freeze: "Depends" when i tryed to open a file, it seemed to be at random, because this also happened with the 8/29 build when i was trying VLC, but later, after i had closed everything re-launched Pstart through portaPotty and tried VLC again, it opened files just fine,

Most of the programs i used, when i went to open files, viewed the Actual file system on the computer, but Foxit Reader, got redirected to the portaPotty created directories.

I also ran IE 6.0.2 through Pstart as a test, the 8/27 build ran it fine, slow, but fine, the 8/29 build showed my history folder as:
History.IE5/index.dat

instead of the normal history table, but seemed to run fine otherwise,


really though, Everything else i ran worked fine, but thats like 20 programs and i doubt you want to read through them all,

as a side note, the new version is a LOT faster with certain operations, like open files and such, but it still took a minute to load up and close programs, though, since im running them through Pstart, that might have something to do with it, ^-^

anyways, i still love this thing to death, ^-^



Edited to hopefully hide ...most of the evidence of my stupidity,

Also, i ran Free Download Manager with both the 8/27 and 8/29 build and it worked pretty good from what i could tell, though it still uses the options of the installed version,
(you can use uniextract to get it out of the installer)

_________________
"It's not that I'm Evil, just that I'm unwillingly Good."
-Stolen, but oh so fitting. ^-^

Note: It might take me a while to reply to any post or comments due to offline reasons.
So if I don't reply or miss a question, this is why.

I guess there's 4 points in there:

1) The PP registry ini defaults to the directory that the PP dll is in and to a file named portaPotty_registry.ini.

2) You can override 1) by placing an empty text file, named portaPotty_registry.ini, in the same directory as the executable.

3) You can also override 2) by including an empty text file, named EXECUTABLE_registry.ini, where EXECUTABLE is the same as the file name of the executable you want to run portably, in the same directory as the executable.

4) The redirected file system is placed in the directory that the currently used PP registry ini is in.

Also, 5) Any child process of a PP-run process will automatically make use of that PP-run process's PP registry ini and PP-redirected file system.

That's the best I can do. Maybe someone else can explain it better.


Okay, here's a point that came up earlier with Andrew and xplorer2, but I should have stressed it again. Don't expect to successfully run an app via PP if you already have that app installed on your system. What you need to do is uninstall that app then PP-run its installer, then PP-run the app. I just tried that with Firefox on a 2K VM and it installed and started fine with the new version I have here. I then tried to just PP-run Firefox as you did, and it failed.


I'd suggest trying again following my above guidelines. Once the font's been installed, all the app needs to do is open it, not modify it. PP only redirects modifications; so yeah, PP's going to let the app use the font. You could try creating a Windows\Fonts directory in that app's redirected file system, and then move the offending font file from the system font directory to that directory, and see if the app still makes use of the font. Also, I'm pretty sure that when fonts are installed, the registry is also modified. So again, please see the above suggestion about how to set up a clean environment for the PP-run app.

Please see my reply to portable-freak regarding how to set up a clean environment for a PP-run app. I'm almost certain the problem you ran into was the same as what Andrew experienced with xplorer2 before he uninstalled it. Also, PP only redirects modifications, so if you didn't do anything to cause xplorer2 to mod its reg entries, there will be no PP registry ini created. The hang on exit is due to an existing reg entry that xplorer2 is trying to delete but PP won't let it delete it out of the reg, and it doesn't exist in the PP registry ini, so PP tells the app that the entry doesn't exist. So the app re-reads the entry, PP sees that it's in the reg, and says, okay, here you go, and then the app tries to delete it again. And it loops that way forever because that's the way the xplorer2 dev coded it.


I'm not quite sure what you're saying here regarding tabbyFile. Was it launched via xplorer2 during the testing mentioned above? Was it PP-run or just normally run? How was the xplorer2 folder created? During a PP-run of xplorer2 or ? I'm sorry, but I can't help solve anything but fairly straightforward problems unless I have specifics that allow me to recreate the steps taken to cause the problem.

Please see my suggestion to portable-freak regarding what steps to take that will hopefully eliminate the flakiness - uninstall, re-install via PP, run via PP.


I just want to make sure that you're saying you're PP-launching apps by using PStart? Not just running the apps themselves via PStart? Or are you PP-running PStart? That'd probably be okay although I did find a small bug today in the CreateProcess redirection. But maybe PStart's using the ShellExecute api call instead. Hmm, I'll have to download PStart and try it out. I was planning on letting devs make use of the PP dll for their launchers, but maybe that's not even necessary. Thanks for the heads-up.


Yeah, there's apparently a lot of reg hits when a number of system dlls are first loaded into memory and used by the "first app of the day," especially when using the open dialog box. If that app happens to be a PP-run app, then it can take quite a long time. But I haven't really even addressed performance yet, so I'm not too concerned (yet.)


That's probably because those programs had never tried to modify those files. Opening and browsing won't do anything to create redirected directories or files. Otherwise you could end up with an entire hard disk's worth of stuff in the redirected directories.


I would never have thought that any version of IE would ever run successfully via PP. But it's really not a fair test, as I'm sure you didn't uninstall IE and then reinstall it via PP, prior to running it with PP. So it was basically using the registry for the most part and probably only modified a few entries. I'm not sure what you're talking about with regards to the history folder so I can't really comment.


That's good to know. Thanks for trying out so many. But I imagine quite a few of these were already installed on your system?


That's not PStart. That's the PP dll loading up all of the PP registry ini's keys into memory, and saving them when the app closes. If you've been PP-running 20+ apps from the same directory, you probably have a fair number of keys in that file. You might want to try and use app-specific PP registry inis to keep each app's redirected reg as small as possible. That should help somewhat.


Yes, it will use the options of the installed version until the app attempts to rewrite them to the registry, which normally happens when you modify one or more of the options. But running the app this way is not running it portably, as you're relying on the pre-existing registry entries for the most part. Some apps this is okay on if you don't care about cleaning up your registry. For other apps though it will cause them all sorts of problems when run via PP.

Hey you all "up there." I just wanted to say thank you very much for the feedback. I was able to squash a few more bugs today thanks to your efforts, and I think things are moving along nicely enough that I can begin to look at optimizing the registry redirection code.

And I know it's a pain to use right now, so thanks for not bringing that up. I think Firewrath's idea of using PStart makes a lot of sense. There's also a guy over on PortableApps who's going to be using the PP dll for his launcher, so maybe you'll have enough launching options available so that building portable versions of your apps isn't all that necessary anymore.

Actually i had tabbyFile on a USB stick, and its never been run on this computer before, then the first time i ran it (through Pstart,) it gave me the same error as Fluffy, but it was on whatever folder it starts in.

And, besides the programs that i ran on Pstart, any i tested i copyed them to their own folder and gave them their own copy of portaP.

What im doing with Pstart, is launching it using portaP. Then every program it launches becomes a 'child' of Pstart and gets caught by portaP.
You gave me the idea when you said that portaP caught notepad from xplorer2. ^-^


<edit/deleted/x2 ...was taken to other thread>


The thing with Foxit Reader is odd though,
its only a PDF reader, and all i told it to do was 'open' so i could test it on a file i had on my desktop, but the only folder options were the ones that portaP caught from my other programs.


As for Internet Explorer, ....That was an accident,
(stupid program links, )
but it started to load and i thought id just see what it did,
what portaP endedup catching from it was some option file or some such, and the history. The history was fine in the 8/27 build, but under the 8/29 build, it showed a link called "History.IE5" the child to that link was "index.dat" and it wouldnt save the history in any IE-accessible way as it did in the 8/27 build.


Most of the programs ive been using are on my USB key, some are from here, but this computer was dead for 3months so i mostly tried the ones that i havnt ran on here yet, but ive also tryed BeamFile, mIRC Hydra IRC, and an IRC server, (also whatever i can download that unixtract will take apart, ^-^) that arnt installed on this system, which ran fine. Though i dont fully trust BeamFile enough to try its Net uses, heh.
(you wouldnt believe how many "portable" programs write stuff to the registry, well, since you wrote PP, mebey you would, but i was surprised, ) I noticed that all the programs that i ran from Pstart, wrote the registry/files in Pstarts folder, so that is prolly why it 'lagged' on startup/shutdown, which i didnt think that would mess with the shutdown of the program till you said something there, ^-^

and truthfully, i dont find portaP a 'pain' to use at all,
i think its great that you only have to drag a program to it to build/launch it (though, i dont use skinned mode, it looks good, but its easyer otherwise,) really, i think its a nice program, just missing a few 'options', but id rather you get it working first before adding to it.


Edit:
just seen you posted in my other thread, (which wasnt there when i started this, i tend to reread and retest things that i say to be sure, ^-^)

but yeah, posting around each other in thread replys, funny that,

_________________
"It's not that I'm Evil, just that I'm unwillingly Good."
-Stolen, but oh so fitting. ^-^

Note: It might take me a while to reply to any post or comments due to offline reasons.
So if I don't reply or miss a question, this is why.

Just a quick report, on my way to work right now
1. I installed Power Tab Editor via PP.
Registry entries were made, no powertab.tff created in WINDOWS\Fonts\
2. I saved the installation directory and removed the program.
3. I copied an old/saved WINDOWS\Fonts\ powertab.tff to where PP dll directory is and run the program via PP.
The prog is running.
It is not perfect but it's running, a bit slow and the font is not displaying music notes, the tablature is displaying OK ( Screenshot )
Leaving powertab.tff in the default WINDOWS\Fonts location displays music notes the right way.
Anyway, it's already great to have it work at least, thanks for the efforts!

Thanks for the info. I'll try and install PTE in a 2K VM and see what's going on with the font usage. There's probably some old api function that loads up the font without making use of the file system api's PP is redirecting.

Also, did my explanation on what's going on help any? I have a new readme I was planning on including in the next version, but to be honest, on re-reading it I know it's going to be confusing for many. And it's looong as well. I've just been doing this sort of stuff for so long that I don't know how to relate to apps in a non-techie way.

Thanks for all of the info mate. I'll take a look at tabbyFile to try and figure out what's up. I think I know what's going on with Foxit though.

If you're launching everything from PStart, then I think you're using a global portaPotty registry ini. And if you're using a global portaPotty ini, you're also using a global redirected file system. Which would explain why Foxit "sees" the redirect desktop created by another one of the apps as opposed to seeing the real desktop.

The reason I think this is the case is because you're launching everything from PStart. And when a new process is created via a PP-run process, the "parent" process passes along the path to its ini to the "child" process. So it doesn't matter if you've put separate copies of PP in any of those directories. They won't be used and it won't cause PP to store the redirected stuff in that app's directory. At least that's how the latest versions have been working.

I coded it up that way because of the installers I ran into that created new exes in the temp directory and then launched them to do the installation. I needed to make sure that those installer processes used the same portapotty registry ini, otherwise you'd wind up with an unused registry ini file in the temp directory that would be of no use to the installed application.

But I can see where doing things the way you're doing them will require an option to allow the child process to go ahead and create/use its own registry ini and redirected directories and files. Give me some time to think about how to implement it and I'll get back to you with a solution, hopefully.

As far as the IE redirection goes, I'm just going to ignore the fact that you did what you did. I don't even want to think about how to get IE to work correctly in a portable manner. :)

Hey all. The next version of the PP dll is now available here.

There's only a few small changes in there; a couple that I made yesterday to get PP to work properly with the Firefox installer and one I made today to begin allowing control over how much and of what the dll redirects. More on that in the coming days as I get things fleshed out.

There's also a new readme in there that gives a more complete explanation of what's working and what's not with regards to registry and file system redirection. It's a long read though and quite stuffy. And it's only about the dll.

Cheers.

Hey Fluffy and Firewrath,

Why are you running tabbyFile via PP? It's already portable. :) (j/k)

The access violation is caused by a bug in the app, although it's aggravated by you having run tabbyFile prior to PP-running it. If you really want to PP-run this app, to fix the problem you need to delete the dat\columns.dat file and then never run tabbyFile outside of PP again, or the problem will probably re-occur. Let me know if you want to know the reasons why, otherwise I'm going to skip the explanation as it's a bit involved.

portable-freak, I have good and bad news about running PTE from PP, depending upon your perspective.

The good news is I was able to make it work, font and all, by installing in a clean 2K VM, creating a WINNT\Fonts directory in the PTE home directory, moving the powertab font file to that directory, and then PP-running PTE. I logged what was going on re: the redirection and PTE went looking for the font file in the normal system font directory but the PP dll redirected it to look into the PTE directory's WINNT\Font directory instead. PTE found the font, loaded it up and made use of it w/o problems.

So I guess the bad news is that I have no idea why things failed for you. The one thing that I probably didn't do that you may have done is to copy the PTE directory off to somewhere else and then uninstalling. I'll give that a go tomorrow to see what happens. If all goes well I'll post again with the steps I took for the entire process.

I also have to thank you for suggesting this app, because I found out something else that I need to take care of in the file system redirection. PTE periodically writes backups to an "Autosave" subdirectory off of its home directory. But since it was being PP-run, those backups went to a "Program Files\Power Tab Software\Power Tab Editor 1.7\Autosave" subdirectory off of its home directory instead. Heh, I obviously somehow need to take this into account to get it back to just "Autosave."

BTW, I was also able to confirm, even though I already knew it wouldn't work, that PP-running an msi-based installer will not redirect anything. No registry changes and no file system changes.

uhhh, i was running tabbyFile because it was umm, ....on my USB stick in Pstart?
...yeah, ill go with that one, *nods*

as for Foxit reader, your right,
i ran foxit through portaP by itself with no problems opening files,

as for your options thing, i think itd be nice if we could choose What we wanted redirected, like either:

Registry
File System
Both, (well, a check mark by the first two would work better, )

OR

let pp generate a a second INI file, with a list of all the files portaP is redirecting, ...deleting or adding a directory/file to this list, would ignore or redirect that file/dir,
(my Fav idea of the 2, ^-^
but prolly harder to put in, -_-)

though, for testing, the first idea would be good, because i have a Hardrive cleaner, and it gets rediected when i go through the file system to find files to delete, (so im using the 8-16 build for it, ^-^) and itd be nice to disable the file redirection for it,
(and im not using this with Pstart. it was just something i found and downloaded to test with,)


...i know this really falls into the idea thread, but it fits the post/my testing,


and as for IE,....
...i was just trying to change windows! /cry


also, i just thought you might be interested in how portaP was handling the redirection for it, *shrugs*
(its "seems" if i run it from Pstart, in my "E:" drive, to redirct the history/cookies, But, if run just by itself, no parent, it doesnt, O_o
im not 100% sure on that though, but yeah,.....)

_________________
"It's not that I'm Evil, just that I'm unwillingly Good."
-Stolen, but oh so fitting. ^-^

Note: It might take me a while to reply to any post or comments due to offline reasons.
So if I don't reply or miss a question, this is why.