DEP causes old applcation or modules to crash

Every now and then, you have to run older software that do not comply to newer ways of doing stuff. One of the problem you might run into is the “Data Execution Prevention” feature in short just called DEP.

To learn more about the DEP feature you can go here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875352
it is an old article for Windows XP and Server 2003, but still explains it right.

The way that the software behaves are often that it does not start and gives you a “Software” has stopped working error message. However, in some cases the software works until you call up features that crashes with DEP. This is what happened to me to day.

I got his message:

Expanding the "View problem details" gives more info:

Googling on Bing did not give any great ideas, but just searching for “BEX” and “stopped working” gave some idea for where the trouble might lay. When I saw references to DEP I knew what I had to do.

BUT, don’t do what most result tells you to do. They tell you to turn DEP off, or just use it for essentials Windows program and services.

 

In DEP you can exclude for selected programs or services.

To do this you have to go into “System Properties” and select “Advanced”

 

Go into “Performance – Settings”

Select the “Data Execution Prevention” tab

 

And if “Turn on DEP for all programs…” are already selected (as is should be) you just click “Add…” and browse to the program file. The file name was in the error message under “Application name”. In my case it is kelioexp.exe.

 

After doing this everything worked fine, on Windows Server 2012 I did not have to reboot, but not sure on older version of server.

The problem might be the same on both client and server OS, but server OS looks like they are more strict and have the error more often, in my environment this day it works well on clients but failed on the Terminal Server (RDP) until I did this.