problem with winspool.dll (or winspool.drv)

[Tom Bishop]

Hi,

The following very small program compiled with MinGW ran fine on Win95 but said "Error while loading DLL 'winspool.dll'" when running on NT4. I was able to solve the problem with these dubious commands:

cd \winnt\system32
copy winspool.drv winspool.dll

(There was no winspool.dll file before this.)

But, it's not OK to ask our customers to mess around with files in the system folder. I notice that libunicows.a contains "winspool.dll"; should it be "winspool.drv", or is some other change needed to the library?

(begin file "test.c")
#include <windows.h>
#include <winspool.h>

int WINAPI WinMain (HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
PSTR szCmdLine, int iCmdShow)
{
DWORD needed, returned;

MessageBox (NULL, TEXT ("Hello!"), TEXT ("test"), 0) ;
EnumPrinters(PRINTER_ENUM_LOCAL, NULL, 4, NULL, 0, &needed, &returned);
MessageBox (NULL, TEXT ("Goodbye!"), TEXT ("test"), 0) ;
return 0 ;
}
(end file "test.c")

(begin "makefile")
CC = gcc
CFLAGS = -DUNICODE=1 -s -O6 -mwindows -Wall -Wshadow -g
CLIBS = -L.. -lunicows -lwinmm -lwinspool
OBJS = test.o
test.exe: $(OBJS)
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(OBJS) -o $@ $(CLIBS)
(end "makefile")

I make this on a Win95 machine using MinGW. Then I move "text.exe" to the NT machine, and run it. It does the "Hello" dialog, then gives the same error message: "Error while loading DLL 'winspool.dll'".

Thanks in advance for any help.

Tom

[Tom Bishop]

I re-built libunicows.a from the source, after editing unicows_import.c, only changing "winspool.dll" to "winspool.drv". This does seem to have solved the problem.

It seems that either name, .dll or .drv, works on Win95, but only .drv works on NT; the actual file is named .drv on both operating systems.

[Vaclav Slavik]

Thanks a lot! Fixed now.