Microsoft released a Windows Update this week that caused quite a problem for Delphi developers still using Delphi 2006 to 2010. When starting a second instance of the IDE they now get the error
Cannot create file C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Local\Temp\EditorLineEnds.ttr
The update in question is a security update for all supported Windows versions and has the number KB2982791. It prevents the file EditorLineEnds.ttr to be created/overwritten because that file is a Truetype font and changing it while it is active is apparently a security risk.
Unfortunately this prevents a meaningful use of these Delphi versions. So what can we do?
There is this question on StackOverflow from which I got the above information. As far as I know there are the following workarounds:
- Uninstall the Windows update KB2982791, which might not be such a good idea. After all it’s a security update. Daniel Magin blogged about this.
- Use Andreas Hausladen’s IdeFixpack (Delphi 2007 version, beware that version 4.4 does not work under Windows 8, version 4.3 seems to work), (for later Delphi versions). Note that the editor option Show Lineends will use a different character if you use this fix because the IDE won’t load the EditorLineEnds.ttr font any more.
- Rename the file every time you want to start Delphi. This is what I will be writing more about.
Of course you don’t want to rename the file by hand every time you start Delphi. So either, you use a batch file to do that for you (see Daniel Magin’s post), or you use the program I wrote for this particular task.
It’s called dzEditorLineEndsFix and is a Tray Icon application that uses FindFirstChangeNotification / FindNextChangeNotification (I always wanted to use these API functions but never had an appropriate use case.) to detect when the file is being created and then moves it to its own unique subdirectory under %temp%.
In theory it will clean up after itself, but that might fail because the file(s) are still in use. So once in a while you should have a look into your %temp% folder and delete all subdirectories called ttr* from it.
Sources are available from the dzEditorLineEndsFix page on SourceForge. There is also a precompiled executable if you don’t want to compile it yourself and trust me not to have added a Trojan to it ;-)