Category Archives: Patching

Case of the Network Name That Couldn’t Be Found

Posted on October 5, 2015 by chentiangemalc

Continuing the series on .NET patching from https://chentiangemalc.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/case-of-the-object-is-not-set-to-an-instance-of-an-object-net-patching/ An application when moved from XP to Windows 8.1 started reporting error The network name cannot be found. A dump file was taken at this point with procdump –ma option (http://live.sysinternals.com/procdump.exe ) … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, AppCompat, Patching | Tagged | Leave a comment

Case of the Object Is Not Set To An Instance of an Object–.NET Patching

Posted on September 3, 2015 by chentiangemalc

Continuing our series on patching .NET code without source ( https://chentiangemalc.wordpress.com/2015/07/31/case-of-the-black-background-window-net-patching/ ) A .NET application which worked fine on Windows 7, started throwing an exception when opening an image in Windows 10’s default editor. However the images still opened OK. … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, C#, Hacking, IL, MSIL, Patching, Reverse Engineering | Tagged | Leave a comment

Case of the Black Background Window (.NET Patching)

Posted on July 31, 2015 by chentiangemalc

On Windows XP  a Windows form had a white background, something like this: However on Windows 8 it had a black background like this, making text on the form unreadable:   This is a common AppCompat bug…where the developer instead … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, AppCompat, IL, Patching | Leave a comment

Removing Forced Reboot From An EXE

Posted on June 9, 2015 by chentiangemalc

Had this process I wanted to execute during a number of tasks, this process had a command line argument “—reboot” which forced an immediate reboot. If you tried to run the command without the “–reboot” option you were given an … Continue reading →

Posted in IDA, Patching | Tagged | Leave a comment

Experimental Use of 64-bit Dump of 32-bit .NET Process in WinDbg

Posted on April 17, 2015 by chentiangemalc

A .NET dmp file is typically best captured as 32-bit for 32-bit process. On x64 system this could be using the 32-bit task manager (C:\windows\syswow64\taskmgr.exe), WinDbg (x86), or a tool like ProcDump (http://live.sysinternals.com/ProcDump.exe ) However what if a 32-bit .NET … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, 64-bit, Patching, WinDbg | Tagged | 6 Comments

Patching a Null Pointer Access Violation

Posted on April 17, 2015 by chentiangemalc

An application was crashing about 5x a time a day so crash dumps were enabled via registry https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb787181(v=vs.85).aspx Looking at the dmp files the program always crashed at same point in the program. This dump file has an exception of … Continue reading →

Posted in IDA, Patching, WinDbg | Tagged | Leave a comment

Continuing Case of ByRef Corruption–.NET Patching

Posted on July 7, 2014 by chentiangemalc

A new revision of app we previously met here https://chentiangemalc.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/case-of-the-invalid-base-key-error/ was out… The “Invalid Base Key” error had been patched, but now we had another. It looked like another case of variables being unexpectedly modified due to liberal and incorrect … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, Hacking, MSIL, Patching | Tagged | Leave a comment

Case of the Admin Check Fail

Posted on June 12, 2014 by chentiangemalc

After users had migrated from Windows XP to Windows 7 an application Continuum ( OmsInst.exe) started to fail with error on some users: Continuum Database InitializationYou must have NT local administrative priviledges to run this application However … This user … Continue reading →

Posted in API Monitor, Application Compatibility, Debugging, Patching, WinDbg | Tagged | Leave a comment

Case of the Full Screen App Hidden by The Taskbar

Posted on May 28, 2014 by chentiangemalc

I’d been called in to assist support a 3rd party software vendor debug their own software, as several issues had been opened for weeks without hope of resolution. One issue was that when program was running on Windows 7 the … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, Patching, WinDbg, Windows 7 | Tagged | Leave a comment

Case of the Invalid Base Key Error

Posted on May 22, 2014 by chentiangemalc

Continuing my series on .NET patching – refer to https://chentiangemalc.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/case-of-the-net-service-hang-patching-webclient-operation-timed-out/ for the previous articles more of an overview of using some of the tools described. A “front end” application that was used to launch another application was failing to launch … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, 64-bit, Application Compatibility, Debugging, Hacking, Patching, Reflexil, WinDbg, Windows 7 | 2 Comments