hello. i don't use the windows version much anymore but i was trying out the
3.6 release this weekend. now, this is on WinME, which I know sucks, so put
your jokes away ;) it came with my laptop and i leave it installed for the
occasional game.

anyway, i've had some issues with the parsing phase(i think) of povray 3.6
when using a mesh2 (exported from wings). pov crashes when I make a change
to the mesh2 object in povray such that the resulting mesh2 has an incorrect
syntax, then try to render it. i'd expect a parse error, not a pvengine
crash. the resulting dialog box says something like (to paraphrase)
"pvengine has caused something awful to happen, press OK or DEBUG". please
note that wings exports correctly and pov will render the image as is. it's
only if i screw up the syntax that it crashes.

Pressing "debug" doesn't do anything. it simply redraws the dialog box. so
i'm forced to click "OK" and pov finishes crashing. Now, i'd like to have
debug work. I'd assume that it would open up a stack trace, or some kind of
debugger where i might get some juicy information to pass along to the pov
team. I couldn't replicate this bug on a different win2k machine, and I
assume not many poeple run WinME.

So my question is, does anyone have a suggestion to get this "debug" button
to work? I believe the last time I ever tried using such a thing was in
win98 when I had Visual Studio installed. I no longer have Visual Studio. Or
can someone suggest a debugger that I can use to run pov with to see what
happens? Free, trial or shareware please. What does the Pov team use in such
a situation?

thanks for your time. any other suggestions on tracking this down would be
appreciated. i'll post real details when I have some. I want to make sure
it's 100% reproduceable and not caused by some other programs running,
before sending people on a wild goose chase.

-r

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