Lightroom might use some SSE2 or later instructions that your Athlon does not support. According to Wikipedia, Athlon XP 2800+ support only SSE.

Anyone know what SSE, if any, is Lightroom using?

I don't think that has anything to do with it, because sometimes adjusting the Masking slider does not make Lightroom crash. It can just happen, randomly I'm afraid.

I thought it happened mostly with high ISO shots but after some testing that is not exactly the case. Though it seems to happen more often with >400 ISO shots, it can also occur with <400 ISO ones.

About an hour ago I developed an ISO 200 image and everything was ok. Reading your reply made me start LR again and develop some pictures, everytime I invoked the Masking it made LR crash.

Then I reopend the shot that I developed an hour ago and readjusted the Masking slider (from 25 to 35). LR did not crash.

Developed some other ones, again LR didn't crash.

So it seems that every time LR is started it thinks by itself: What shall I do this time, behave myself or not?

0xc0000005 is an "access violation." Something tried to access a place in memory that was illegal or impossible. We don't know which operation failed because we don't have a symbolic crashdump (we just have an offset), but we know it was in CameraRaw.dll. This does not automatically mean that this DLL is suspect, only that this is where it was when it did something bad. It could have been given a bad address by something else.

CameraRaw.dll is a workhorse utility DLL that offers a lot of image services. In fact, I suspect it crashes in a different place for raw vs. JPEG images. If not, it is probably in the GDIplus stuff.  There are no CPU or GPU specific functions in this DLL, and I'm pretty sure Lr has no dependencies on specific CPU or GPU calls -- it just makes generic calls to the OS for such resources. Ps had to do this in the past in order to squeeze more performance out of then-current workstations (and it is a 100% compiled native app) but generally this sort of trickery is no longer required. Doing stuff like this is always a trade-off between performance and testing/support nightmares, and you are at the mercy of the various CPU and GPU revisions out there.

Lr offloads a lot of its stuff to a Lua VM, which acts as a sort of glue between various image services and native UI services. The win here is that it is relatively easy to port Lr to various platforms, and you don't have to maintain such large multiple streams of code lines for each platform.

Report what you can to Adobe, and copy and paste as much of the crash log(s) you have. A .dmp file would be nice, but this takes a little tweaking to get right. If Adobe needs it, they can instruct you have to provide this. Make sure you know if you are running in 64-bit mode or not.

Same thing for me too

Lightroom 3.2 crashes every time I am trying to use masking in the sharpening tool.

And no, this is not SSE related.

I have used the debugger and saw that it crashes because of use of uninitialized pointer.

I will test this issue on other machine tomorrow and will post the results.

Hope this will be fixed in the near future...

// Added

I have debugged LR a little bit more.

It crashes because it does not allocate memory for the image data, but tries to use it.

As a temporary workaround - you can move 'Clarity' slider on a needed photo, then reset it if you do not want to increase clarity.

This will allocate memory properly.

Now you can move Masking slider in the 'sharpening' tool without a crash.

And as another side effect of this bug - selecting any slider in the sharpening tool with pressed alt should show you the effect on the grayscaled image, but it works not every time.

@Dorin,

It's indeed an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ running at 2.15 GHz.

@123-and-a-lot-of-z's

I tried the trick with the clarity slider and this workaround seems to help. Thank you for your investigation!

Well, some hours spend in the debugger and I've made fix for this crashes.

You can download it from here: http://www.multiupload.com/99210FAR5H

Note: USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK.

While it works just great for me, I can not promise anything.

And note that this is NOT official fix for the problem, it needs to be fixed by developers so it's better to send bug reports.

This solution can be used while there are no better solutions from Adobe.

This fix is only for 32-bit Lightroom 3.2

To install - just unpack this library to the folder where you have your LR installed.

For example C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.2

It is better to save original library (to be able rollback all changes) and then overwrite it with this fix.

In fact this is original CameraRaw.dll, but just little patched.

Hope this will work for you too

Enjoy.

Sorry, don't have a Pentium III or Athlon XP around...

Well, for those who don't like to wait

CameraRaw.dll from Lightroom 3.3 RC1 fixed for non-SSE2 CPUs.

http://www.multiupload.com/PMHYLNYVGI

Usage instructions are same as with previous versions, just overwrite original library in the Lightroom application folder.

clvrmnky wrote:

 

According to the system requirements, Windows users need at least a Pentium 4.

So what? You can not use it on any 32-bit AMD CPU?

Lightroom works fine on those CPUs, and this is NOT CPU-related problem, this is memory management problem.

Lightroom just have a number of implementations of the same things optimized for different processors, and memory management bug comes out only in implementation for CPU without SSE2.

So Lightroom supports AMD CPUs in its own, but implementation just have bug with memory allocation.

clvrmnky wrote:

It is related to CPU when we are talking about which instructions sets are supported, or not.

Lightroom crashes not because of use of unsupported instructions, but because it tries to use unallocated memory.

This is memory management issue, not CPU issue.

P4 users may have memory leaks due to this bug, Lightroom is not crashing - but this does not mean that everything is ok.

Will you please let us know where we can download the patch?

It has been the only solution this far.

Oops, I did it again

Just overwrite original library in the application folder (32-bit only).

LR 3.3 sharpening crash fix for non-SSE2 CPUs:

http://www.multiupload.com/47ZE7BGIV5

Not surprisingly, Adobe Camera Raw 6.3 have the same problem.

To completely fix this problem, you should also install patched Camera Raw plug-in.

Download link, 32-bit only: http://www.multiupload.com/SDPSHS6IK8

Just overwrite original plug-in, by default it is located in the: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-Ins\CS5\File Formats

This will fix the problem for all CS5 applications: Photoshop, Bridge, etc because they all use this plug-in.

Sorry, but I will not patch previous versions, so you will need to update Camera Raw to version 6.3 before using patched plug-in.

This problem is present in all Camera Raw 6.x and appears only on non-SSE2 CPUs.

Hi. I have no free time at the moment.

But I will patch the ACR 6.4 and LR 3.4 and post the link to patch here in the near future (during next week I hope).

So keep checking this topic from time to time.