‘Abnormal Program Termination’ – BACKTRACK Error Message

Target Audience: Basic User, Advanced User, IT Manager
Article #: 11319

Summary

A user received an error message stating, “Abnormal program termination. Configuration system failed to initialize.” when launching BACKTRACK. After displaying the message, the BACKTRACK program terminated.

Explanation

We discovered this issue in the network installation for BACKTRACK. When the problem occurred, we discovered a file in the \\<Server Name>\Backtrack shared folder with the current date and time. Upon inspection of the file, we noticed a detail error message with the location of the configuration file that was causing problems for BACKTRACK.

In this specific case, the file was User.CONFIG in C:\Users\Peter\AppData\Local\Teklynx_Newco_SAS\btw.exe_Url_4hvo5aipzickvnuovsxq1qr5vdsjixhr\2015.0.15.2

When we examined the User.CONFIG file, we found that it was small and appeared to be incomplete. Our conclusion was that the file was corrupted.

Solution

Since this is a network installation, it means that we have other workstations using BACKTRACK. We were able to replace the User.CONFIG file with one from another workstation. This resolved the issue as the “Abnormal Program Termination” did not recur on the next launch.

In theory, uninstalling BACKTRACK and manually deleting the User.CONFIG file before reinstalling the program may also resolve the issue, but we did not test this solution.

Additional Comments

Issue Found: BACKTRACK 2012, 2015