ROTOR Exceptions and XP SP2

Possibly old news, but I wanted to archive the answer here for posterity. XP SP2 made some security related changes that impacted ROTOR… in particular a customer recently reported:

The issue revolves around exception handling. It would appear that XP SP2 introduced a breaking change to the exception handling in the SSCLI 1.0 so that it no longer catches exceptions (ignores catch blocks and just terminates the application) and it no longer reports exception messages on the command line. The lack of exception messages is annoying and hampers debugging but the fact that the exception mechanism just does not work at all is a serious issue.

Here is more information…

https://mailserver.di.unipi.it/pipermail/dotnet-sscli/msg00244.html

https://discuss.develop.com/archives/wa.exe?A2=ind0508a&L=dotnet-rotor&T=0&F=&S=&P=157

And I, in the spirit of a source release…. to patch for Windows XP is pretty small. Just add the following 3 lines to

sscli/rotorenv/bin/makefile.def:

  # Set linker options

  #

+ !if "$(VS71COMNTOOLS)" != ""

+ LINKER_FLAGS = $(LINKER_FLAGS) /SAFESEH:NO

+ !endif

+

  # Merge .rtc section with .text. .rtc section is meant for debug info.

  # VC6 doesn't get rid of it. Win2000 loader fails to load retail mscor* dlls with

  # .rtc section.