The rest of the Subject line should read "... when running sandboxed -- but completely normal operation when "Disable forced programs" is checked and StarOffice runs without sandboxing.

There are so many items, I do not know if I should list them in separate posts, but I decided that I will put everything here, in case someone can see a pattern. I will add, the same office suite was, and still is, running fine inside Sandboxie with Windows 2000 Professional, and essentially the same configuration (so far as I can tell).

My first attempt was to import my (five or six year old?) sandboxie.ini from Windows 2000 to Windows 7, but StarOffice's browser window was a near disaster, until Tzuk said to start over, and that was much better. I suspect Sandboxie's new MSIE-rules being keyed to a more recent MSHTML.DLL version may have something to do with that.

So, to get to this point, I have copied the essentials (opening the StarOffice directories to access by soffice.exe) from the old sandboxie.ini, to the best of my ability, plus taking the new rules from the MSIE templates and renaming their .exe references from iexplore to soffice. This is because MSIE's MSHTML.DLL runs as a process under soffice.exe (which is of course, StarOffice).

I have used the new configuration GUI whenever possible, except I was having trouble reproducing information from the templates, in that way, so did it with a manual edit.

In any event, the office suite's browser window is now running fine.

Certain other things, however, are not. Example: access to the suite's context menu is necessary to set up mailboxes. Not much else seems to be wrong, so if someone can help me with the following, I should be OK (pending further discoveries!).

When I right-click in the Explorer area to set up a mailbox, the suite freezes, with an hourglass cursor. If I wait about two or three minutes, error messages begin to appear:


Again, all of the above applies only when the office suite runs sandboxed. A while after the error messages, the cursor reappears inside the suite. The context menu may be used, at this time, but there's a delay after some selections. I would not want to use the suite, as this is not normal operation.

The Resource Access Monitor log actually records the freeze's resolution. I know you're supposed to start the log before the program initializes, and I do have that, but there's no way of attaching files to posts, and it would make the first post extremely long.
I have one log that begins before the program runs, a second that begins just before the mouse right-click that freezes the suite, and the above log, that begins immediately after the right-click and lasts until the hourglass-cursor disappears.

I have made an attempt to translate one or two of the 'X' entries on the other logs into Resource Access commands, but for whatever reason, restarting the office suite sandboxed keeps giving the same result.

Any ideas? Which of the above logs should I post? Both? Or something else??

I wanted to get the first post up as soon as possible. Here are the other logs.

1. Resource Access Monitor started before launching StarOffice:


2. Resource Access Monitor started just before activating the context menu, the action that freezes the office suite when the cursor turns into an hourglass:


The 'freeze' is not permanent. Eventually the hourglass will disappear, and a that point a right-click will bring up a context menu.

We should try to identify if any of your custom settings are causing this, or if it occurs regardless of any special settings. So my question is: Are you able to run your office suite in a new sandbox with default settings without applying any custom settings?

Thanks! Good idea.

I will Sandbox->Create New Sandbox, named StarOffice2, un-force the office suite in the original StarOffice box, then force it in StarOffice2. Will then run soffice.exe and try to open the Context Menu again, and report back with the result.

Result: The same error messages are displayed. Right click brings up the hourglass, not the Context menu. After waiting some minutes, the error messages come first, then the Context Menu. Trying to bring up the Context Menu once more starts the same process, over again.



The above log was started just before launching the program, and copied from the Resource Monitor after waiting a few seconds after the hourglass cursor appeared. No attempt was made to open a browser window inside the suite.

There is reference to InCD. But, I did not attempt to access the optical drive, so I have no explanation for this.

I see some X's at the end but need help to find out what's relevant, and what's not! Or, might the solution lie in an entirely different area??

P.S.: Just to see what would happen I went directly to soffice.exe and did a RunAsAdministrator. Presumably it did, but the result was the same: it locked on the hourglass cursor, for some minutes, after trying to bring up the Context Menu. The same error messages displayed, and when they were closed, the Context Menu did finally appear.

Alright, if you see the problem in the default configuration then hopefully I can reproduce it to figure out what's wrong.
But you don't say which version of StarOffice you use. If you can you give a download link for the specific version you use, that would probably be best.

Thanks much for the generous offer. It's version 5.2, and the remainder of my system details are in my signature -- and I do apologize that it appears only in my first post. For the subsequent posts, my signature is visible in Preview, but then it disappears in the final post, as soon as I click Submit.

Let me know if I'm doing something wrong.

You may find the both installation instructions and the download link for the office suite, right here. Although I installed from a purchased disk (I wanted the printed and bound manual) the functionality of a downloaded version 5.2 should be the same.

Once the suite is installed, Sun's 'final patch' should be applied by running a self-extracting 'zip' file in the suite's root directory. I will let you get started on the suite first.

The first runs of StarOffice, following installation, were in Windows 7's Windows 2000 compatibility-mode. There were one or two 'false starts' (while Windows 7 was adjusting its 'shims' -- or whatever?) and then the startups were smooth, after that.

Based upon my original experiences with the same installation, on Windows98SE, I have always installed this office suite with the OS running in Windows Safe-Mode. I would also advise installing with Run as Administrator, as well, just to make sure.

You may install it anywhere, but a few features are better-behaved if it's allowed to go into its default location, the OS's root directory.

This page contains a link that will indirectly take you to a download for Patch 109945-03. Look for the last line in the column headed, General Informations [sic]. The line reads, Download at Oracle MOS.

A log-in is required, but the box says it requires only a free registration. Should there be more to it than this, and should whatever is required be inconvenient, let me know if there's any way of getting a fairly small file attachment to you, and I'll send my copy. The patch is not very large: the readme and the zipped patch, together, are only a little over 20MB.

Please let me know if you need anything else, to assist with your analysis.

Problems with the above links (preceding post) were resolved, as described in a PM.

In retrospect, the solution will be easier for tzuk than was my original plan.

Thanks for the instructions, I installed StarOffice. Now, as for triggering the problem:



I don't understand what that means. I see the StarOffice Explorer window when I start the application. But I don't know where to right-click to trigger the problem. I will need some specific instructions.

Also please check if SandboxieRpcSs.exe is running in the sandbox, at the time when you're getting the error message.

Tzuk, let this take precedence over anything I wrote before, as I was more concerned then about how to make sure you had the program running. I think the following will be better, for trouble-shooting:

The suite installs configured with only two default Desktops: the one from MS Windows and StarOffice's own. Let us use the StarOffice desktop for the test. The user may easily configure as many additional desktops as would be desired, but this is not necessary for the test. We will proceed as if we wished to set up E-mail In- and Outboxes directly on the StarOffice desktop, and not a separate E-mail Desktop (which is more practical for actual use).

Right-click on the Desktop icon to the right of the StarOffice Start button (with butterfly image). A drop-down Menu of available desktops appears. Select with a right (or left) click C:/office52/user/desktop (depending upon where the suite was installed, this may vary). The next time this Menu is opened, a checkmark will appear next to one of the desktops, to confirm the selection has been successful.

Left-clicking the Desktop icon now displays the office suite's internal desktop (as selected in the previous step), which then becomes the suite's default desktop, should you close the suite, at this point, and later open it again. You will see the icons here, on the StarOffice desktop, for the various functions available from within the suite.

Right-click with the cursor on any open area on that desktop, and the problem will be observed. If you wait long enough, the Context Menu will appear. If things were going normally, the Context Menu would appear immediately and the selection 'New' would then be used to set up Inboxes, Outboxes (or anything else that one selects from the Context Menu) that then would appear (only) on whichever desktop was operative at that time.

But the behavior of the suite is so abnormal up to that point, I have not attempted to go any farther, until the temporary freeze plus various error messages are 'ironed out'.

Yes, I checked again, and SandboxieRpcSs.exe is running, as the errors occur.

Thanks again for going to all this trouble, and certainly ask again if any of this needs further clarification. To avoid having to scroll back through the thread, I'll again mention, yes, the suite runs normally under Windows 7 Pro, if not forced to run sandboxed.

Still haven't been able to reproduce the exact problem but please try this, go into Sandbox Settings, Resource Access, File Access, Full Access, click Edit/Add and paste:

\Device\NamedPipe\ProtectedPrefix\LocalService\FTHPIPE

Click OK all the way back and I'd like to know if this has any effect on any of the weird stuff you see in the sandboxed StarOffice.

No, sorry, still getting the 'freeze' in place of the Context Menu ... a freeze, followed by the error messages, when the suite 'unfreezes'.

In addition to what you said, I dumped the Sandbox, after editing Sandboxie.ini as directed, then re-opened StarOffice with the new setting.

While you were testing, I was doing some fine-editing on the earlier post of instructions, to make sure they said exactly what I wanted to say. You may want to read back over that, to see if the extra edits change anything, in the steps you took.

Only one other thing ... I didn't include Adabas in my upload as I couldn't imagine this could cause a problem. However, if you think otherwise, I will provide that. Though not an integral part of StarOffice, I do have it on my installation. This is for StarOffice Base, which I have yet to invoke under Sandboxie.

Edit: this time, after waiting until the suite 'unfroze' and the Context Menu appeared, as a test, I clicked New->Folder and immediately a new folder appeared on the desktop. However, when I tried to repeat by adding something else, we got the frozen-hourglass, again.

Are you sure the setting was applied correctly? Perhaps run another resource log to confirm this.

You mentioned 'shims' earlier, that's actually the reason I asked you to add the resource. StarOffice seems to overwrite/corrupt its own memory space, and Windows 7 has a shim (compatibility tweak) called Fault Tolerant Heap. I guess this shim restores some old memory management functionality because I saw that it completely stopped StarOffice from corrupting its own memory space and crashing all the time.

But in the sandbox, the corruption and crashes continued. Turns out the shim requires access to this FTHPIPE resource to actually work, so by adding the resource, the compatibility tweak can also work in the sandbox. At this point StarOffice seemed to finally become usable in the sandbox for me.

Now as I said, I couldn't reproduce the problem as you describe it, but if memory corruption is involved, I figured it might manifest in random ways. Perhaps crashes for me, and just failure of the context menu for you. So hopefully this can still fix the problem.

If it doesn't, I'm not sure what else I can look at. I tried installing Java and then reinstalling StarOffice, just in case Java has something to do with it. But still I can't reproduce the problem, my context menus work fine in both "desktops" inside StarOffice.

Wow, you really know Windows 7 inside-and-out.

Just to make certain I understand, are you saying, on your installation, you never experienced the Context Menu problem, but instead crashes of the entire office suite, itself. And after applying the Resource Access Parameter, StarOffice became completely stable, whether or not it was running sandboxed?

I will double-check to make certain I entered it exactly:


Were you running soffice.exe directly, or through a 'shortcut' with a compatibility mode defined? Or, do you think this makes no difference?

Since you were able to get normal function, maybe -- instead of just setting up a fresh StarOffice sandbox inside the existing sandboxie.ini -- I should rename Sandboxie's .ini file, again run Sandboxie, and start with this new file, making sure I follow your directions exactly, from that point on. I take it that's the only modification you made to a fresh .ini file?

I think I recall that if the executable doesn't find sandboxie.ini, it will automatically create a fresh one.

If I am correct in my understanding, maybe I should work from this angle first, and then if this fails, go ahead and send a new Resource Monitor Log, with only the setting you gave me in place.

Thanks again, your comment that it should work is encouraging. Anything to add?

Yes, I got a message from Sandboxie that a completely-new default box was being created. But, when I tried to run soffice.exe, or a shortcut leading to that, the startup of StarOffice aborted with the following message:



If anyone has ideas on that please let me know. Never saw this one before. Will edit this post if I can interpret it from the error message explanations, before I receive a reply.