FreeCAD under Windows 7 issues

[moolander]

Hello,

I just installed FreeCAD for the first time, but I think I'm missing something. All in all, I didn't manage to draw anything, having run into a couple of issues.

issue #1:
Selecting a workbench, makes a "Workbench failure" dialog appear, that says "DLL load failed: The specified procedure could not be found".

issue #2:
Pressing most command buttons (axis system, 2-point line etc) results in an error message in the status bar that reads "Running the python command '...' failed".
The Reinforcement, Floor, Building, Roof and Space commands seem to work.
The Section command throws the error but also makes a section appear under the Tree view.

I used the 64-bit .exe file to install the program and I don't have manually installed Python or pivy.

OS: Windows 7
Word size: 64-bit
Version: 0.14.3700 (Git)
Branch: releases/FreeCAD-0-14
Hash: 32f5aae0a64333ec8d5d160dbc46e690510c8fe1
Python version: 2.7.6
Qt version: 4.8.5
Coin version: 4.0.0a
SoQt version: 1.6.0a

[wmayer]

Selecting a workbench, makes a "Workbench failure" dialog appear, that says "DLL load failed: The specified procedure could not be found".

Try to load all workbenches and make a list of which load and which not, please.

[moolander]

The task proved more complicated that I thought. Supposing 'loading' means performing changes to the tool palettes, here are the results:

Arch and Draft produce an error and then load.

Complete, Drawing, Fem, Inspection, Part, Part design, Raytracing, Reverse engineering, Robot and Sketcher produce an error and do nothing.

<none>, Image, Mesh design, OpenSCAD, Plot, Points, Ship, Spreadsheet, Start, Test framework and Web load without an error.

Now, the tricky bit is that going from Inspection or Drawing to Draft doesn't produce an error. Going from Image or Complete to Draft sometimes produces an error, but I don't know what I should search for in order to narrow it down.
This is something I came across by chance, so possibly there are other two-step (or more) combinations that produce different results, but they're too many to try out.

[wmayer]

Thanks, that's the result I more or less expected. Now go to C:\Windows\system32 and search for DLLs that start with "TK". Are there any?

[moolander]

Nope, none.

[wmayer]

Hmm. The problem is that all workbenches that depend on OpenCascade don't load and usually this happens because a (binary incompatible) DLL we need is loaded from somewhere else.
So, if this is not the problem then download the tool dependency walker from www.dependencywalker.com, uncompress the zip file e.g. to C:\temp.

Then run this Python snippet (load e.g. the Mesh workbench to get the Python console)

Code: Select all

import os
os.system("C:/Temp/depends.exe")

In the appearing application load e.g. the file Part.pyd from the FreeCAD installation. Look for any error messages.

[moolander]

Hi,

First, thank you for taking the time to guide me through this.

I took the steps you described and a file named ieshims.dll seems to be missing.

A quick search indicates that there's one file named like this in C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer, any chance this would be the one needed?

Edit:
- I tried copying it into C:\Program Files\FreeCAD 0.14\bin\ and nothing changed.
- I moved it into C:\Program Files\FreeCAD 0.14\lib\ and FreeCAD crashed when I chose 'Architectural design' from the Start center.
I removed it from \lib\ so now the setup is back to the way it was.

[moolander]

Googling 'ieshims.dll freecad' I found a couple of similar issues in the past, which wmayer helped resolve.
I'm not sure I entirely understood the problem and how it could apply in this case, so I went on and installed FreeCAD 0.14.3700_x86 today on the same machine. It seems to work fine.