RPC issues in older programs after installing the April 2024 cumulative update

Scott Fitzpatrick 0

I haven't been able to find any information about this yet.

We still have some older versions of our software in use. These versions were built with Visual Studio 6. After installing the April 2024 cumulative update, some of the programs that use RPC started crashing. We have newer versions of software that were built with Visual Studio 2013. These programs still work. I was able to narrow it down to the /Oicf MIDL flag when generating the method stubs. In the current versions of MIDL, the /Oicf flag is turned on by default. In the Visual Studio 6 version (MIDL 5), it is off by default. When I rebuild the applications with the flag, they no longer crash. I understand that Visual Studio 6 is extremely old at the point, but it is not always practical for our customers to upgrade regularly.

My question is, is this an issue with the Windows Update? If so, is there a plan to fix it? If not, is there a way to work around this without code changes? It would help to have a workaround until our software can be upgraded. Perhaps a windows policy setting or something similar. I haven't found anything yet.

So far this does not appear to be restricted to a version of Windows. We have seen this on Windows 10+ and Windows Server 2016+.

Mike Fowler 0 Reputation points

2024-04-24T17:32:20.22+00:00

This post is designed primarily to implore Microsoft to consider providing a work-around for the issues associated with the April 2024 Updates onto legacy platforms running legacy software.

We've seen the same issue reported by multiple of our customers running from Windows 10 LTSB and LTSC OS. Each of these customers are using one of our Remote Client interface which employ Active-X and RPC bound communications, with our Servers. They each reported, after installing the April 2024 Updates, the Application stopped working. Some reported a popup error while others reported that no error message was evident. As stated in the post above, we traced the issue down to our legacy RPC stubs, which were built using Visual Studio C++ V6.0.

These failing programs have been running for years without issue. All customers which removed the updates were able to resume proper operation with the affected applications. This issue has already been reported across multiple Releases of our product. For that reason alone, a fix will require significant number of patch updates, to address all the affected versions. Not to mention our customer's headaches associated with having to update a very high count of user's machines, currently used to run our client/server base software.