Visual C++ 6.0 on Windows 8

visual-c++, visual-c++-6, windows-8

Solution

Turning off OLE RPC debugging (Tools / Options / Debug) works for me (Windows 8 Pro 64 bit, Visual C++ 6.0 with SP6). This solution was suggested (later) within the above-mentioned MSDN forum thread.

Problem

Visual C++ 6.0 is not supported on Windows 8, but we have a couple of legacy apps that still needs to be compiled with Visual C++ 6.0. :-( It is possible to install Visual C++ 6.0 on Windows 8 by unchecking Data Access -> Change Options -> ADO, RDS and OLE DB Providers. See this SU-question and this thread. You also need to install SP6 afterwards. Visual C++ 6.0 works perfectly on one computer, but two others cannot use the debugger. The same hardware, same version of Windows, same person doing the installation, same project. There must be some difference... On the computers with the problem you can set a break point and the debugger will break into the IDE, but when you try do step, step into or run the code will crash with Unhandled exception in EXENAME.EXE (OLE32.DLL): 0xC0000005: Access Violation. Walter Oney reports the exact same problem on MSDN forums, but they have no solution as VC++ 6.0 is unsupported. As we have Visual C++ 6.0 working on one Win8 computer there is apparently way to do it. Any ideas on what the difference could be?

Original source