Windows XP SP2 and Nikon Software

Last night I bought a shiny new PC for home; it's based on an AMD Athlon 64 FX, with 2x160Gb SATA RAID-0 drives,  1Gig of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra. It's pretty quick :)

I got the AMD Athlon CPU primarily for the Data Execution Protection support.

I then set about installing a whole bunch o' software: Office 2003 (it took 4mins 23secs to install! I'm serious!), Virtual PC, Visual Studio "Whidbey", PhotoShop CS, CA eTrust antivirus software, Acrobat, some "network analysis" tools :), a couple of games (I don't play games much - I just want to see what the video card is capable of! Well, that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it,) print drivers (Canon i9100 and Kodak Pro 8500,) and a whole bunch of other things, including the software for my camera, a Nikon D100.

Anyway - everything runs fine, except the Nikon software; Nikon Capture 4.x and Nikon View 6.x. Looks like this code has a couple of issues which are caught by DEP. The remedy is easy, just add these processes to the DEP exception list, and then the apps run nicely. Read this for more info: "You receive a "Data Execution Prevention" error message in Windows XP Service Pack 2" at https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;875351

I take my hat off to the Windows shell guys - if a user mode app fails with a DEP failure, the exception list pops up, with the process in the list, you then just tick the process name, and voila, it's all done. I think this is a great usability enhancer; compare that with clicking the Start menu, right clicking My Computer, clicking properties, clicking Advanced, clicking Performance Settings, clicking the Data Execution Protection Tab and then finding the executable on the hard drive!

Good work, guys!

Now I need to have a chat with someone at Nikon to get this fixed so I can remove them from the exception list.