Error loading bootloader using VB.NET 2008 (Windows XP only?)

Question

When I run my application (WPF, VB.net 2008) on Windows XP, I get strange Windows errors. When I installed VS2008 on machines that got an error and debugged. I got a bootloader lock exception, so I went into Debug and deleted it. However, I still get the error when it is installed on the machine.

Is there a way to remove the bootloader lock exception when installing the application. I understand that this may not be the best solution, but it seems that this only happens when I start WindowsElementHost with ReportViewer, and this causes a problem, so I do not know what else to do with it.

All versions of XP have the same problem as in 2003.

In Windows 7 and Vista, I never encountered this error when debugging and installing a product. The same applies to 2008 and 2008R2.

Answer 1

I did a little research, and below you can find my guesses:

• Perhaps this is a bug in the report viewer itself, and you should upgrade to a later version. I noticed that in December 2012 a new version was released (see this post ), supposedly working both on .NET 3.5 and 4.0 (this should work with VB 2008, see the download page );
• I noticed that Report Viewer 2008 SP1 requires .NET 3.5 SP1 (see download page ) - perhaps the outdated version may throw an exception that you see;
• Perhaps, Windows XP is not updated to the latest service pack or is the wrong edition - again, Report Viewer 2010 SP1 requires Windows XP SP3 (see the download page ) and Report Viewer 2012 does not start in Windows XP Starter Edition;
• perhaps this is the library used by the report viewer that throws this exception (especially the mixed-mode assembly) - in this sense a dump or a stack trace will be useful;
• this thread forum has a comprehensive answer on the Visual Studio Tools for Office forum that lists resources for understanding this problem;
• the previous link assumes that in some circumstances it is safe to ignore this lock. If when testing in Visual Studio with the MDA Loader Lock disabled, you see that there are no problems, you can disable MDA on production machines using the instructions on this blog - this is mainly due to setting the environment variable and adding some lines to the app.config file (see also the documentation for Loader Lock MDA to see how the new lines look). I have not tried it, but I thought it might be useful for you as a last resort - just be sure to thoroughly test your application to avoid unwanted side effects.

To get more help, I suggest you indicate:

• version of the report viewer used;
• The version of the .NET Framework that is targeted (in particular, the service pack)
• What service pack is installed for Windows XP;
• any stack trace or debugging information that you can collect.