HeidiSQL Causes Spontaneous Reboot

Looking around for an alternative to the good but rather expensive Navicat, I stumbled upon HeidiSQL. In the very short time I've been running it I'm quite pleased with what it does and how it performs.

But unfortunately I've just discovered a serious problem.

Any attempt to rename a Session in the Session Manager results in an immediate reboot of the computer. Every time. Without fail.

I'm running fully patched XP-SP3 on a well maintained PC that I use daily.

It might help reduce the message traffic if I mention that I've been in IT support for many years, so we can skip all the beginner-level system checks. Not that I think I couldn't miss anything, but given the history of the machine and the way it's used, there is not likely to be a trivial reason behind this problem.

Actually I'm not really expecting a solution at all as such, because I know how difficult things like this can be to track down. I guess I'm mainly wondering if anyone else has experienced this sort of behavior, or if the developers might have a trace version I could try.

I'm quite willing to provide any assistance I can to track down the root cause.

TIA

UPDATE:

Whatever is upsetting the Session Manager is more widespread than I thought. Since I couldn't rename a session I created a duplicate with the name I wanted to use. No problem there, until I went to delete the original, then Reboot!

Obviously caused by registry privilege stuff, as this function tries to move the relevant registry key where your session settings are located.

Moves an existing key, its subkeys, and data values to a new location using a new key name.

procedure TRegistry.MoveKey(const OldName: string; const NewName: string; Delete: Boolean);

Hmm... Do you have some special config in place, probably some registry changes watcher or something like that?

My apologies for taking so long to report back -- I had to concentrate on other things for a while.

Well, I have no idea why, but after spontaneously rebooting several times as described in my previous message above, the problem just "went away". Not being a believer in self-healing software problems, this has got me stumped.

I made no configuration changes, didn't install or uninstall anything. I'm wondering if my personal firewall (Online Armor from TallEmu.com) had anything to do with it, though the problem did survive several reboots before "disappearing".

Oh well, at least all is working fine now.

From what I've seen so far this is an excellent and extremely useful tool.

HeidiSQL is a strictly user mode application, there is in theory nothing it can do directly that will crash the system.

Is it an automatic reboot after a BSOD? In that case turn off automatic reboots under System Properties --> Advanced --> Startup and Recovery and see if the BSOD contains a driver/filter name. Maybe you can even enable a minidump so that we have something to examine in WinDbg.

Check the system logs with eventvwr, maybe there is a clue there.

The firewall would be a prime suspect, as would any kernel mode driver, especially ones that hasn't been certified by Microsoft. I know of at least one Windows firewall product that will cause an instant reboot of XP if you run it alongside a networking driver that sends address translated packets onto the network, for some reason.

Aside from dodgy drivers, a thorough system check might be a good idea. Run the disk through a complete surface scrub with CHKDSK to check for bad sectors covering the area where the registry hive is stored. Reboot into memtest86+ to diagnose the CPU, cache, RAM and motherboard for malfunction.

That's about all the suggestions I can come up with on top of my head..