Old application won't work under Vista.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ciarán Ó Duibhín
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Ciarán Ó Duibhín

I have Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (32-bit) and am trying to run an old
OCR application. I run it in Win95 compatibility mode.

Most functions of the old application work in Vista, but it fails if I ask
it to acquire an image from the scanner. I am asked to select my twain
source, which I do (Samsung SCX4100), but then the scanner gives a couple of
grunts and a message box from Vista says "Twain.dll Client's 32-Bit Thunking
Server has stopped working". I close the box, am told to check for Windows
updates, and finally (when I try clicking around on the application) that
"NTVDM.EXE is not responding" and I have to close the application.

I have no alternative twain sources to try, just this scanner source.

The scanner works fine with other (modern) applications.

My c:\windows\twunk_32.exe is version 1.7.1.0 dated 2006/11/02. I believe
that it came with Vista.

I don't really know what is going on, but I assume that the application is
calling twunk_32.exe to handle the actual scanning. It looks to me as if
Vista has ways of running old applications like mine, involving twunk_32.exe
and NTVDM.EXE, but they are not working on my machine.

I would be grateful for any suggestions to fix this.
 
OCR programs tend to work closely with the OS. If this is a very old
application, it is probably not compatible with Vista and you will need
an up-to-date OCR program.
 
I have Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (32-bit) and am trying to run an old
OCR application. I run it in Win95 compatibility mode.

Most functions of the old application work in Vista, but it fails if I ask
it to acquire an image from the scanner. I am asked to select my twain
source, which I do (Samsung SCX4100), but then the scanner gives a couple of
grunts and a message box from Vista says "Twain.dll Client's 32-Bit Thunking
Server has stopped working". I close the box, am told to check for Windows
updates, and finally (when I try clicking around on the application) that
"NTVDM.EXE is not responding" and I have to close the application.

I have no alternative twain sources to try, just this scanner source.

The scanner works fine with other (modern) applications.

My c:\windows\twunk_32.exe is version 1.7.1.0 dated 2006/11/02. I believe
Click to expand...


Are you sure it`s Twunk_32.exe and not Twain ?
 
Thanks, Dominic.

The reason I'm persevering with this old application - which hasn't been
developed or supported for well over 10 years - is that it is trainable to
recognize the non-Latin alphabet I'm working with. I've tried and failed to
train FineReader on the same alphabet. I don't know of any other OCR
application which is trainable from scratch on an alphabet.

I'm operating at present on Vista by using a modern application to scan the
pages to TIFF images, and using the old application to do the recognition on
the TIFFs. It would be a lot more convenient to have one application do
both parts of the work.

So I'm willing to spend some effort in getting the old app to talk to the
scanner, if someone can help me to understand and fix it, or can convince me
that it can't be fixed. In the second case, my best option may be to go
back to using it in Win95.
 
Are you sure it`s Twunk_32.exe and not Twain ?
Click to expand...

Thanks, Jim.

No I'm not sure about very much in this area. I'm just going by the Vista
error message "Twain.dll Client's 32-Bit Thunking Server has stopped
working", and the fact that "Twain.dll Client's 32-Bit Thunking Server" is
the file description of C:\Windows\twunk_32.exe. I'm sure twunk and twain
are related, but I don't understand exactly how.
 
Ciarán Ó Duibhín said:
So I'm willing to spend some effort in getting the old app to talk to the
scanner, if someone can help me to understand and fix it, or can convince
me that it can't be fixed. In the second case, my best option may be to
go back to using it in Win95.
Click to expand...

Sorry if I missed it earlier, but how is this scanner connected the
computer? USB, parallel, serial, SCSI, etc.?

- Bill
 
Ciarán Ó Duibhín said:
Thanks, Dominic.

The reason I'm persevering with this old application - which hasn't been
developed or supported for well over 10 years - is that it is trainable to
recognize the non-Latin alphabet I'm working with. I've tried and failed
to train FineReader on the same alphabet. I don't know of any other OCR
application which is trainable from scratch on an alphabet.

I'm operating at present on Vista by using a modern application to scan
the pages to TIFF images, and using the old application to do the
recognition on the TIFFs. It would be a lot more convenient to have one
application do both parts of the work.

So I'm willing to spend some effort in getting the old app to talk to the
scanner, if someone can help me to understand and fix it, or can convince
me that it can't be fixed. In the second case, my best option may be to
go back to using it in Win95.
Click to expand...

You may be better off finding a used XP Pro system - I regularly see these
for under CDN$150 - and using that for the scanner. Share the output
folder.

You can waste a lot of time coming to the conclusion that an old piece of
software just won't work properly under a newer OS. If your time has any
value at all, a used, dedicated machine can be *cheaper*.

HTH
-pk
 
Patrick Keenan said:
You may be better off finding a used XP Pro system - I regularly see these
for under CDN$150 - and using that for the scanner. Share the output
folder.

You can waste a lot of time coming to the conclusion that an old piece of
software just won't work properly under a newer OS. If your time has any
value at all, a used, dedicated machine can be *cheaper*.

HTH
-pk
Click to expand...
You might try this program's trial to see if you can get it to work. I has
OCR scanning and runs well on my Windows Vista 64-Bit system.
http://www.hamrick.com/
 
Thanks for that idea, Bill, that was something I never even thought of.

The connection is USB. My printer/scanner has a parallel port, but my Vista
computer hasn't. So I moved the printer/scanner and old app temporarily to
an XP machine, where I had the choice of USB or parallel connection. There
I found, however, that the result does not depend on whether I use USB or
parallel connection.

In XP, using a "modern" application (IrfanView), an image can be scanned
successfully. But using my old app, the scanner window does not popup (to
let me set resolution etc), the scan does however take place, but ends with
"Lead error: Data format not supported". So the process of scanning an
image in the old app goes further in XP than in Vista, but the problem is
there in XP too.

...
 
Ciarán Ó Duibhín said:
Thanks for that idea, Bill, that was something I never even thought of.

The connection is USB. My printer/scanner has a parallel port, but my
Vista ((..omitted..))
I found, however, that the result does not depend on whether I use USB or
parallel connection.
Click to expand...

Ah, too bad. If it worked parallel, and your computer had a parallel port,
I was going to suggest running XP or ME or 95 or whatever in a Virtual PC
session. VPC can access your parallel port, but can't get at the USB one.
And you could share a folder between between VPC and the host system. I did
this, briefly, with my older scanner after I upgraded my computer from ME to
Vista. The scanner, however, had other problems so I eventually just
replaced it with one that was supported by Vista directly.

- Bill
 
I have Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (32-bit) and am trying to run an old
OCR application. I run it in Win95 compatibility mode.

Most functions of the old application work in Vista, but it fails if I ask
it to acquire an image from the scanner. I am asked to select my twain
source, which I do (Samsung SCX4100), but then the scanner gives a couple of
grunts and a message box from Vista says "Twain.dll Client's 32-Bit Thunking
Server has stopped working". I close the box, am told to check for Windows
updates, and finally (when I try clicking around on the application) that
"NTVDM.EXE is not responding" and I have to close the application.

I have no alternative twain sources to try, just this scanner source.

The scanner works fine with other (modern) applications.

My c:\windows\twunk_32.exe is version 1.7.1.0 dated 2006/11/02. I believe
that it came with Vista.

I don't really know what is going on, but I assume that the application is
calling twunk_32.exe to handle the actual scanning. It looks to me as if
Vista has ways of running old applications like mine, involving twunk_32.exe
and NTVDM.EXE, but they are not working on my machine.

I would be grateful for any suggestions to fix this.
Click to expand...


Can your OCR program work with files instead of dealing directly with
the scanner? If so, use you newer scanning programs that work and
scan the documents to TIFF files. The use your OCR program to do it's
thing on the TIFF files. I have done this several times over the
years to do OCR when for whatever reason I was not able to do the scan
directly from the OCR program. Most OCR programs will not only read
the TIFF files but if you put them in a directory together (for multi
page documents) it will open the next sequentially numbers TIFF file
and do successive pages that way.
 
Can your OCR program work with files instead of dealing directly with
the scanner? If so, use you newer scanning programs that work and
scan the documents to TIFF files. The use your OCR program to do it's
thing on the TIFF files. I have done this several times over the
years to do OCR when for whatever reason I was not able to do the scan
directly from the OCR program. Most OCR programs will not only read
the TIFF files but if you put them in a directory together (for multi
page documents) it will open the next sequentially numbers TIFF file
and do successive pages that way.
Click to expand...

Thanks for replying. Yes, it can do that, and that is what I am having to
do at present.
 
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