I have not been able to launch Dorico Pro on my Windows 11 network managed laptop. It will launch one time and get to the audio engine, which fails, and it crashes and creates a diagnostics zip. I’ve been working with my network IT and Claude to decipher the diagnostics, and it appears that I have a corrupted “heap.”
Here’s Claude’s version:
The log sequence in the application log also confirms the crash happens right after license handshake succeeds, at “Wait for audio engine initialization” → “Audio engine process died” — i.e., the moment the audio engine process spins up and starts touching its own CRT heap. …
The new dumps show the same signature as before, and it’s now fully reproducible — 9 fresh crashes today (Dorico5.exe and VSTAudioEngine5.exe), all identical:
Exception:0xC0000374 — STATUS_HEAP_CORRUPTION
Location:ntdll.dll+0x112165 in every single dump, both executables
After that initial crash, it won’t even try to launch again until I restart my computer. We have tried reinstalling Visual C++ Redistributables (something we have to do after every Windows update for some of my other apps to run). We have tried updating the Steinberg Library Manager, running the Audio Engine file separately, reinstalling Dorico, and running everything as local admin, but so far nothing we have tried has worked.
I did find older threads on this topic, but they are 6 years old and what was discussed as a solution doesn’t seem to apply. I was using this app last year (I use it seasonally) and it did work then, but I have reinstalled my OS since then, and some of my audio hardware no longer works (specifically, the onboard microphone) due to a driver error. Not sure if that has any impact on anything.
sorry to hear about your trouble.
And yes, please, do send the diagnostics file. If you can’t attach it to the thread here, please send via e-mail directly to u dot stoermer at steinberg dot de. Thanks
It’s a workstation in a network environment with domain level security. That’s what I meant by network-managed. Dorico Pro has been whitelisted and elevated to run as local administrator so I’m hoping that will not be the problem.
Hi @dianek, thanks for the data. This is a difficult and delicate case you have.
Your diagnostics contain crash files from both Dorico and the Dorico Audio Engine. And both fail in the same way, namely by running out of heap space when trying to access the Steinberg License Engine. Here for example is a screenshot of a callstack. The latest function call is always on the top, so you have to read it from bottom to top.
You see the license-engine-access.dll which calls into wintrust.dll and that one then into crypt32.dll and so on. At some stage the heap space is used up and an exception gets thrown. Wintrust.dll and crypt32.dll and all the rest are all from Microsoft and belong to the operating system. So I hope that you can see that it is at least not a Steinberg only issue.
Well, now the question is, what to do about it? From the logs I can see that you have the latest Dorico 5 installed and the latest Windows 11. My guess is that somewhere something got corrupted, either in the Dorico installation or even in Windows.
First I’d try to reinstall Dorico, by simply going to the Steinberg Download Assistant, go to the Dorico 5 Pro section and hit the Install again button. If that does not help, I’d go for this advice I found with Google: Run System File Checker: If the file is locally damaged or throwing false corruption breakpoints, open an elevated commavnd prompt and run sfc /scannow to restore system binaries
These are the results so far. I hope you can also involve your IT team and pick on their expertise.
I know that we already ran the system scans. That was one of the first things the IT tech I’m working with tried. We did try a reinstall of Dorico already as well. We didn’t uninstall it first, just reinstalled over what was there.
Why are you running Dorico, or any music creation software, as administrator? That can sometimes cause strange things, especially on the security side of things, if there’s a security boundary to be crossed. It can also mess up the locations of settings and files.
how about trying with Dorico 6 and see how that behaves in your environment? Dorico 6 can be installed in parallel to Dorico 5 without the 2 interfering each other. You can get a Dorico 6 trial license (60 days) from here.
We ran the MemTest this morning, and it appeared to return no errors. I have 32 gigs of ram. I’m a graphic designer so I have Adobe apps and other things installed on my gaming laptop. We’re going to try the memtest again in a boot environment tomorrow.
