Hi y'all!
Maybe someone can help me. I'm struggling through my first softice tutorial. I set a breakpoint on GetDlgItemTextA and SI pops up into USER32.dll. When I try to 'p ret' out, the SI window closes and the program continues execution. I then have to press ctrl-d TWICE to pop-up the SI window. It feels like a bug but i'm probably doing something wrong. All I found in the manual is:
If you are stepping and the statement or instruction is a function call, control is not returned until the fuction call is complete.
Any ideas?

PS: When my modem is connected, 100s of messages starting with WinAcNt are logged to SI's command window, each one making an annoying beep on my pc speaker. Can these be turned off?
example:
WinAcNtPutChar putting 'x' e9 in typeahead at 0xff49f404

ty

Upgraded to Driverstudio 2.5 and the 'p ret' stepping now works fine. I still get these damn "WinAcNt..." messages tho.

Hi there:

Firstly, I too had the same problem as the GetDlgItemTextA. I thought it was the programmer who did some "tricks" with SEH and left it at that. Thanks for the update that it was a SICE bug

Okey as for the second one, it is your modem driver/app writing debug logs (remember SICE the kernel debugger can catch and display all outputdebugstring, dbgprint and other messages) Programmers use such apis to print strings during driver run time so that they can monitor the driver functioning. Actually, at final *release* build, they're supposed to recompile the driver code removing the DbgPrint messages, but I guess they were too lazy

So, I guess you'll have to live with it.... (hey, you can patch those calls, oh well here i am rambling again )

Signed,
-- FoxThree

Thanks foxthree, I was getting the same impression from combing through MSKB articles, that my modem drivers are compiled with debug information.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314743 tells how to enable and disable verbose debug tracing in drivers and subsystems. It states:


Would it be possible to set this type of variable in SoftICE? Where can i find the Kd_xxxxxx_Masks the page is talking about? Below is a sample of what I get in SI when I am connected OR check the Serial Port status in Computer Management:


I'm assuming that my winacpci.sys is the culprit here. There should be a way to set debugging off by typing the SoftICE equvalent of ed WINACPCI!WinacpciDebugMask 0x00000000, right? The above link also mentions a Global Mask, Kd_Win2000_Mask, that filters debug output. I'm not clear whether this is a WinXP-only feature or not, maybe someone who has ntddk.h could help? phew!

Kurtz

Replaced winacpci.sys with the original winacpci on the W2k CD and DbgPrint messages have disappeared. The solution was so simple, yet i spent days trying to solve it by installing Kernel Debugger extensions in SoftICE and playing with passing "DebugLevel" parameters to winacpci. Oh well, live and learn i guess