VNC UnCrash

It’s a quick ‘n’ dirty program to automatically recover from WinVNC’s occasional (or on some machines, frequent) crashes.

You know the story: You’re working on your server 30 miles away late Saturday night. All of a sudden you get no response from your VNC connection. You open another session and it connects to the socket, then sits there "negotiating protocol" until it times out. You know at the other end there’s this stupid dialog box that reads "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library" and tells you that VNC died. Unfortunately, since it’s only MOSTLY dead until you get rid of the dialog box, you can’t launch another copy of it, even if you have a telnet server or some other means of sending a remote command.

It just sits there and checks every 15 seconds for the presence of a C++ dialog box. Note that another program could produce one, but being rather simple, it assumes that it was WinVNC that produced it. If not, it’s not the end of the world. Anyway, it immediately banishes the dialog box, waits 3 seconds, and relaunches WinVNC.

When your VNC session suddenly pauses then disappears, simply wait at least 3 seconds and connect again!

Download the program, unzip the single .exe file and place it in the directory of the WinVNC installation you want restarted. Maybe put a short cut to it in your Startup folder so it’ll launch automatically. Anyway, just run it and leave it minimized for crash protection.

Click on the appropriate link below.

Hey, don’t complain – I told you it was QnD! :-) If you want to take the source code and improve it, go right ahead!