VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sun Jan 24 2010 - 13:33:16 CST

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 10:47:42AM -0500, Ursula Zangrilli wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I downloaded the VMD: Windows OpenGL executable and installed it.
> However, when I go to open the program, I get the following message:
[...]

All of the messages up to this point were normal

> Found 68 plugins or data handlers in directory
>
> 'C:/Program Files/University of Illinois/VMD/plugins/WIN32/molfile'.
> 7 [main] vmd 8744 C:\Program Files\University of Illinois\VMD\vmd.exe: ***
> fatal error - Incompatible cygwin .dll -- incompatible per_process info 0
> != 16

I ran into this problem just the other day actually while testing VMD on
a machine on a cluster at Microsoft Labs. It turns out that one of the
VMD binary plugins was compiled using cygwin, and that the latest versions
of the cygwin runtime library have broken backwards compatibility. The
end result of this is that when VMD tries to load this plugin, the cygwin
runtime library aborts and kills the whole program. You can prevent this
from happening by going into your VMD installation and overwriting the
offending plugin file like this:

Open a Windows command prompt, or use the file browser to navigate to
the VMD installation directory (as administrator):
  cd "C:/Program Files/University of Illinois/VMD/plugins/WIN32/tcl/intersurf1.1/bin"
  rename intersurf.dll intersurf.dll.cygwincrash
  type NUL > intersurf.dll

That will create a zero length file in place of the old intersurf.dll,
which is required so that the VMD installation doesn't try to automatically
"repair" itself by reinstalling the intersurf.dll file the next time
you run it.

Let me know if you need further assistance with this.

I will be working on updating the intersurf plugin to address
this problem.

Cheers,
  John 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078