The mysterious vanishing rundll32.exe

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Posts: 1
Joined: 4 Nov 2019 - 01:25
The mysterious vanishing rundll32.exe

Hello,

For years  I have been using VirtualMIDISynth on Windows 7 Profession, 64-bit system, in conjunction with Sibelius music editing software,  but suddenly today I started Sibelius and everything went wrong with my audio setup. The configuration of VirtualMIDISynth was corrupted and it reverted to using "generic low latency ASIO drivers" instead the Realtek drivers. It took me a while to work out how to get things working again and then reset the audio settings within Sibelius too because it reset itself to a default configuration when the Synth went mad.

Now Sibelius & Synth are working but the VirtualMIDISynth Configurator complains that rundll32.exe was not found in C:\Windows\SysWOW64\

I was using VirtualMIDISynth version 1.16 and so I updated to the latest version 2.8.0 but the same problem exists when I try to run the Configurator, but after I click OK on the warning message it runs fine, it seems.

Why does VirtualMIDISynth Configurator require rundll32.exe? Why does it work perfectly well after it has complained about the missing file.

Has my virus checker deleted it?

I ran sfc /scannow but it could not repair or restore the file. It believes it should be version 6.1.7601.23755 but I can't find any way of downloading the correct version from the internet. Can anyone help?

thank you,

Michael

Posts: 1972
Joined: 25 Mar 2012 - 01:19
Re: The mysterious vanishing rundll32.exe

Rundll32.exe is a system component used to call a method that enumerates the MIDI devices available on the system and show them in the MIDIMapper tab.
It shows both 32 and 64 bit devices.

MIDI devices enumeration can't be done directly by VMS itself because of Windows cross-bitness limits: 64-bit processes can only enumerate 64-bit devices and 32-bit processes can only enumerate 32-bit MIDI devices.
Thus VMS (64-bit) runs the 32-bit version of RunDLL32.exe (in C:\Windows\SysWOW64) and enumerates 32-bit devices.

mkilpatr wrote:
Why does VirtualMIDISynth Configurator require rundll32.exe? Why does it work perfectly well after it has complained about the missing file.

It runs "perfectly" but it should miss the 32-bit devices...

mkilpatr wrote:
I ran sfc /scannow but it could not repair or restore the file. It believes it should be version 6.1.7601.23755 but I can't find any way of downloading the correct version from the internet. Can anyone help?

Well, it should ;)
Don't know why it does not repair it, but VMS is not the only one software needing RunDLL32.exe; I wonder if you're going to experience more issues in the future.
Maybe an in-place update could help (it should perserve all of your installed stuff, anyway be ready for a backup)...