Dependency walker hangs

Question

I have a problem with my.xll addin when it loads on my clients PC. It crashes Excel at startup (possible because of missing dependent dlls).

I know it is possible to use dependency walker in profile mode to find out what dlls are loaded when the .exe runs. When I try that dependency walker hangs when profiling Excel, and I can’t find out why.

In a command window I ran this:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\8.1\Tools\x86>start /wait depends.exe /c /f:1 /pb /pp:1 /pg:1 /oc:d:\temp\Log.txt "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\excel.exe"

But it hangs.

I am using dependency walker version 2.2.9600 x86, Windows 8.1 x86, office 2010 x86

I also tried to setup a VM machine with a clean install of win 8.1 and Office 2010 but XL does not crash on that machine when I load the .xll.

I works on another machine Windows 10 x64, office 2013 x64 and dependency walker x64. I can profile Excel.

Note: I ended up using Sysinternals Process Explorer instead. A bit more complicated but works.

Answer 1

I'm currently on Windows 10 build 1809, and depends.exe hangs for every dll I try it with. The depends home page says "Dependency Walker runs on Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7, and 8" so I guess it's not supported.

Try Dependencies - An open-source modern Dependency Walker, it works fine for me.

Answer 2

Microsoft has very slowly been adding modularization, versioning, and indirection to Windows OS API libraries.¹ This effort started in Windows 7, but only in recent builds of Windows 10 has this initiative hit some of the core win32/kernel libraries that essentially all traditional Windows binaries link to and use.

Naïve dependency walkers will create a graph combinatorial explosion for themselves they try render the complete dependency graph without some extra logic to short-circuit this layer of indirection, or limit the depth of the graph search to be on-demand at a certain depth. If your program is relatively simple, depends.exe will eventually wake up and render the dependency graph for you, but it may take a few hours.

I don't know if the author of depends.exe intends to ever update it, but in the meantime, as Andrew pointed out in his answer, the lucasg/Dependencies project on GitHub seems to not suffer from the same problem.

Also see this SO post: Dependency Walker: missing dlls