Re: IDL crashing badly on my solaris 8 system

[Jonathan Joseph <jj21(at)cornell.edu>]

Still crashing the CDE session - but I now have more info.

Both Peter Clinch and RSI very promptly (thank you) suggested that
I select C Posix from the language menu at the login screen.
Unfortunately, this did not solve my problem.

It turns out that the font error messages may have been
a red herring.  After questionnig the student, I
discovered that his problem resulting in a bunch of font error messages
followed by a crash of IDL, and the IDL crash that crashed the whole CDE
session were two distinct problems.  Perhaps the C-Posix idea
will fix font problem crash, but I'll worry about that later.

We found that we could easily reproduce the CDE session crash by
typing the following command:

IDL> xplot3d,[1],[1],[1]

So, I did a little digging to see if I could find the
exact line in xplot3d.pro that caused the crash.  And I could.
It turned out to be the line:

oWindow->Draw, oScene

I then tried running one of my own object graphics programs, and
it also killed the CDE session (presumably at the draw command,
but I didn't verify that).

So, the problem seems closely tied to using object graphics.
Can anyone out there make an educated guess as to how this
might result in a crash of the CDE session?

I've crashed the session using either IDL 5.3 or 5.4, so if it's
an IDL bug it's not a new 5.4 problem.

Thanks for any input.

-Jonathan