Useful program/technique for troubleshooting plugin installs

[JerGoertz]

Hey gang,

Wanted to share with y'all my recent experience getting a plugin to run, which hopefully you'll find useful.

Over the past half-year I've been on-again/off-again in the process of migrating my music setup from an aging 2005-era Athlon64 laptop(!) to a more modern Win7 desktop, with the ambitious goal of getting almost all my old plugins to work. I've encountered very old plugins which required registry hacks (e.g., Edirol Orchestral and Waldorf Edition), others which necessitated finding the VST .dll's in non-standard installation locations (e.g., VintageWarmer 1), and still others whose latest versions simply didn't work for me and whose solution was to roll back a version or two prior. However a certain plugin stands out as one which taxed my troubleshooting abilities above the others, but which I did eventually conquer: Gearbox by Line 6.

First off, the installers on my physical disk wouldn't run under Win7, so I tracked down the latest for this now-discontinued product at Line 6's website and was able to get it up and running. For a while. The standalone always worked fine, but after some time the plugin started complaining about being "Unable to open L6TWXG library" or somesuch. I figured a library I'd installed with another program may have overwritten the version which Gearbox required, so I did an uninstall and reinstall which fixed the problem. For a while. Okay, I had seen this before. Time for another un+re -install cycle. Only this time it didn't fix it. My DAW is offline, so I dragged it off to my office and the internet connection, un- and re- installed with the online authorization system active... and again no dice. I was disappointed but determined to get this working, and from the sound of the error message it seemed a file access problem was likely. After doing some google research I found a very handy program called Process Monitor by sysinternals, which among other things allows you to monitor file access events. So I fired this up and allowed Gearbox to fail upon VST scan. Bingo! Process Monitor showed me which places Gearbox was trying to find the L6TWXG library, and the solution was to copy this file (which Gearbox installs, just not where it looks) to one of these locations. Somewhat of a kludge/hack, but it got Gearbox up and running for me, which was good enough.

-Jer

[bob bobwood]

Process Monitor
v3.2 (May 26, 2015)
Monitor file system, Registry, process, thread and DLL activity in real-time.

Windows Sysinternals
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sys ... s/bb896645

From the Sysinternals Licensing FAQ;

Q: Will the Sysinternals tools continue to be freely available?
A: Yes, Microsoft has no plans to remove or charge for these tools..

So it's Microsoft Windows Sysinternals and it's free.