plugin intermittently fails to load

[pjkdeveloper]

Has anyone experienced this?

I have a General Purpose plugin, that 95% of the time loads and works without a problem.

Intermittently, on a machine here and there, the plugin will fail to load. By that I mean, the plugin is in the Plugins directory, but does not load (does not appear in the Options->Preferences->General Purpose preferences screen).

The user reboots, and after 1, 2, 3 attempts of rebooting, the plugin will load, work, AND appear in the Options->Preferences->General Purpose preferences screen.

This *seems* to happen mostly on Windows 7. It's so intermittent, that it is difficult to track down.

Has anyone written a plugin that fails to load intermittently?

Obviously, if my entry point is wrong, the plugin would never load...but...it is weird that on a machine here and there, the plugin WILL NOT LOAD....yet after rebooting 1, 2, 3 times, then the plugin will magically load and work.

This is happening on a few users machines....(not many, but enough to know that it is a PROBLEM)

My question: Has anyone experienced anything like this? I'm hoping someone can help me with information on what possibilities might exist for winamp to reject (or fail to load) a plugin........

I would think that when I run across a machine with winamp installed (latest version) that fails to load my plugin....I would think that it would fail *every* time (for whatever reason)...the puzzling thing is....on these machines....after a reboot or two, my plugin loads and works perfectly!?

Has anyone experienced anything like this?

Thank you so much for any help or advice you might be able to offer!

[DrO]

i don't remember seeing / hearing about such an issue as usually a plug-in will or will not load and that's about it.

without knowing what the plug-in is or what it's doing, i can only guess it's most likely a dll-dependency / a loaded supporting library which fails and so in turn the plug-in cannot load fully. another thing would be to make sure the plug-in is returning 0 in the init(..) function as not returning 0 will cause a general purpose plug-in to tell Winamp to unload it.

other option would be to use a tool like process monitor to see what is loading and failing on those machines to narrow it down that way.

-daz