Kensington Mouse Drivers Kills Click-Once

Michael Jacobsen

For a long time I had a strange problem on my workstation. Some programs crashed before showing a window. For example, I was unable to run programs in the standard Visual Studio projects folder under my documents and settings. But they ran fine when moved somewhere else. I suspected some permission problem but I could not find and thus fix it.

Another program that I have helped develop, FarmGuard, had an even more bizarre behaviour. It would run until I switched out of the program and back! That is,

  • Start the program
  • Do none or some work in the program - it works perfectly
  • Switch to another window - no matter which
  • Switch back to the FarmGuard window
  • Crash! The window simply disappears - no asking about debugger - just nothing

Attaching the Windows debugger showed me that it was a stack overflow but my skills with the debugger is not good enough to find out more than that. And this only happened when I used the version installed via Click Once and not when I ran the exact same program from the build directory. The FarmGuard program is written en C# with the WPF framework which should eliminate stack overflow problems on our part. I tried upgrading my GFX drivers but no luck.

Then by change I stumpled on an article from Microsoft. And yes removing the drivers for my trackball solved all my issues. Note the date on the article - it is from 2006 and Kensington has not fixed their drivers yet!

The driver uses a 128 byte buffer to do something about the path of the program. When you use Click-Once (FarmGuard) or are in a subdirectory of

c:\Documents and Settings\user\Document\Visual Studio 2008\My Projects\.

A large number of bytes are used before you get to the actual executeable and you overflow the buffer, destroys the stack effectively crashing the program.

Who would expect a mouse driver to cause such strange behaviour.