Just as a final note: I uninstalled and re-installed a fresh download of
MSXML4 SP2 and all of my tests now work flawlessly.

Interestingly, after uninstalling, the symptoms were still there. I guess
because there were other programs dependent on MSXML it didn't really
uninstall it. Certainly both the uninstall and reinstall completed in much
faster time than I would expect, so maybe the reinstall just fixed up a
registry key.

As for what caused the problem in the first place, I have recently installed
office 2003 (which, as already noted, includes MSXML5) and also the word
2003 XML viewer (which I'm assuming includes MSXML4 because it is
specifically designed to work where office 2003 is not installed). Maybe it
was one of these two that caused a problem in the registry. certainly the
system is generally very stable so I have no reason to suspect a hardware
(disk or RAM) error caused a corruption in a DLL or anything.

Andy


"Andy Fish" <ajfish@b...> wrote in message
news:Kcwkc.1368$hy6.13373588@n......
> Thanks Chris,
>
> I've tried it will msxml5 as per Han's suggestion and that works fine too.
>
> I'll reinstall msxml4 but even if I can't get to the bottom of it, msxml5
> will be a good enough workaround as my target system has office 2003
>
> will post back if I find anything interesting
>
> Andy
>
> "Chris Barber" <chris@b...> wrote in message
> news:uoC9OStLEHA.808@t......
> > Andy emailed the XML, XSL and VB project to me and as far as I can
tell -
> the code is spotless.
> > I ran it a lot of times without error in both IDE and compiled
executable
> so I've suggested that
> > MSXML4 might be corrupted and should be re-installed.
> >
> > Chris,
> >
> > "Chris Barber" <chris@b...> wrote in message
> > news:uhCLidsLEHA.2068@T......
> > Can you email me an XML and XSLT that fails for you - I'd like to try it
> here?
> >
> > Does it fail when run from an appropriate IDE such as Xselerator or
> XMLSpy? Does it fail if you do
> > the transform to string as opposed to object?
> >
> > Chris.
> >
> > "Andy Fish" <ajfish@b...> wrote in message
> > news:I2ukc.1200$qp5.12182741@n......
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am trying to use the word2html.xsl stylesheet included as part of
> > Microsoft's Word 2003 XML viewer to transform a WordML (AKA
> > WordProcessingML) file into HTML
> >
> > It works with the .Net XSLT processor but when I try to use MSXML4 I get
> an
> > error message
> >
> > The instruction at "0x69b1fdff referenced memory at 0x00000004". The
> memory
> > could not be "read".
> >
> > when I click OK to terminate, the system seems to go into a loop with VB
> > taking 100%cpu
> >
> > it seems to work OK for trivial documents (a few lines of plain text)
and
> > fails every time for large complex ones. For some small documents it
works
> > first time but fails if I do it again.
> >
> > here is the complete code:
> >
> > Private Sub Command1_Click()
> >     Dim xmldoc As New DOMDocument40
> >     Dim xsldoc As New DOMDocument40
> >     xmldoc.async = False
> >     xsldoc.async = False
> >     xsldoc.Load "word2html.xsl"
> >     xmldoc.Load "word.xml"
> >     Call xmldoc.transformNode(xsldoc)
> > End Sub
> >
> > (I have stripped out the error checking but suffice to say the documents
> > load OK). Here is a sample document:
> >
> > 1 Heading
> > Hello there Hello there Hello there Hello there Hello there Hello there
> > Hello there Hello there
> > 2 Heading
> >
> > note that the two headings are in "heading 1" style with automatic
> > numbering.
> >
> > This example works the first 2 times and then crashes the third time I
> click
> > the button. If one of the headings is not formatted with Heading style,
> the
> > conversion works every time.
> >
> > I'm sure this is some kind of timing or memory allocation issue but it's
> > fair to say I'm completely stumped on this one.
> >
> > many thanks for any ideas
> >
> > Andy
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>