Multiple Ghostwall Win Xp 64 problems

After the fall of Tiny Firewall, the need to find a replacement arose. Since the current number of software firewalls that support Windows 64 is a grand total of 1 since Tiny Firewall no longer works with the latest security patches, and no apparent life signs from its support or developers, Ghostwall was it.

Unfortunately i've run into several problems as Ghostwall won't run on a stock Windows XP 64bit.

The first issue are missing DLL's.
I had to hunt down and install the following DLL's from DLL sites:
psapi.dll
avifil32.dll
winmm.dll

Having installed those DLL's the following error now shows when trying to launch ghostwall:
The procedure entry point SMapLS could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll

Is the any solution to this problem? It would be very nice to be able to run a software firewall on Windows XP 64 bit
Would of course also be nice if Ghostwall included the non standard libraries it appears to depend on when installing on Windows XP 64 bit.

 

Those are standard x64 libraries. You have a problem with your windows installation.

 

Reinstalled Windows, same problem.
However, instead of downloading the DLL's from DLL sites, i copied the versions present in SysWOW64 into the System directory.

For some reason Ghostwall appears to not look in the right location for the dll's.

Also had to copy msacm32.dll and msvfw32.dll to System.

There are also versions of these files in System32, but from what i have caught on these forums those are actually the 64bit libraries.
Im confused as to why Ghostwall would fail to find them even on a clean install.

 

GhostWall's executable is actually 32-bit even on x64 systems so it doesn't care about contents of system32 directory at all. And it seems that GW doesn't need those DLLs (look image below).

So check you're using the latest GW version because your problem is really strange.

 

Yep... I would be inclined to support Espresso's perspective on this!

I have used Ghostwall on several x64 installs without any issues...

 

I don't think it's his install. I had ghostwall running fine, and then suddenly I get a "can't find winmm.dll" error out of the blue after days of fine running. I reformat and reinstall Windows XP x64 and then two days later the same problem occurs. I have moved this dll around places and there is no change in ghostwall's inability to find it.

This is totally weird because the previous x64 machine I had had no problems whatsoever like this and it ran for half a year just fine. Its hardware was much older however (nforce 2, where mine is now an nforce 570), so I'm wondering if there isn't something fishy going on with nvidia motherboard drivers.

 

Did you try placing the 32bit winmm.dll from syswow64/system32 directory (if it exists there) to the directory ghostwall.exe is installed in? winmm.dll (the 32bit dll) needs to be in syswow64 and system32 because of the way ghostwall installs it's driver on the system (which changes the 32/64 bit mapping). In the future I will reduce most of the dependencies my apps use thanks to the new GUI methods being worked on.

 

Actually, I did. I did a search through my comp for that dll and then moved it to the ghostwall folder to overwrite what was there (this was after the problem began, but I overwrote with the system 32 one to see if it'd do anything). Well, I reformatted again and have ghostwall on and working perfectly now, so I'm not sure what the issue was. It's almost like it forgets how to find the dll; so maybe something went awry in the registry.

Actually, now that I think about it.. I think I used a registry cleaner before the problem began. The weird part is that uninstalling and reinstalling ghostwall doesn't fix it either. But maybe the registry cleaners are changing something basic that ghostwall relys on... Well, that is if ShadowMaster used one before his problem started?

Sounds like you have alot of awesome things in store. I look forward to seeing.

 

Ah, the good old registry cleaner rears its ugly head, once again. What one did you use?

 

so i'm getting that WINMM.DLL error as well. it only occurs when i try to open the ghostwall window, it never occurs when ghostwall is just sitting there. so what's the deal? i dled a different version of the WINMM.DLL, and put it in the \windows\system32 directory, and there was already another file there with the same name... strange. so i put a .bak extension on it, and put that new dll file in there and tried to register it with regsvr32, and regsvr didn't want to register it. any ideas on a fix? i never had a problem with 32-bit os's, it has to be the x64 stuff. thanks.

now this is really interesting. when i bring up the GUI for ghostwall, i get that error. so i click ok hundreds of times and it just keeps poppin up. so i move the error window outside of the ghostwall gui, and it goes away... now the SECOND i move my mouse onto the ghostwall gui, that error message pops up again... so it seems to be triggered by the mouse touching the gui. very weird. any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

This problem just hit me and the only change to my system is installing uTorrent. I came home from school today (installed uTorrent yesterday, after uninstalling BitTorrent) and everything was fine. Was on my PC for an hour and the error popped up asking for avifil32.dll.

By putting that in the WINDOWS folder or GhostWall folder it just moves on to a new dll file. Once it stops asking for dlls it gives me that SMapLS error.

I've been using GhostWall for about five or six months now with no issues. Literally the only system change besides making a few word documents was the uninstallation of BitTorrent and installation of uTorrent. I changed the port number in the GhostWall gui to what uTorrent is using. I only browsed the internet for a few minutes when the error occured.

This has me thinking registry as its the only common ground I've been able to find between all reports of this issue I could find via google.

Edit: I'm running XP64 and have been since it came out. I've had zero issues with it since they started making 64bit drivers (like after the first month) beyond not being able to play games as old as Civ2 without emulation.

 

Sounds like a dynamic loading of a DLL is failing for some reason. Some actions like moving the mouse over the GUI trigger loading of DLLs. If the files they say are missing are actually in the proper directories maybe they are incorrect versions in the path somewhere it is trying to load?

My winmm.dll in c:\windows\syswow64\ is 172 KB (176,640 bytes), version 5.2.3790.1830