Kat says:
February 12, 2026 at 3:54 am
Hiya!
As mentioned by some other comments, without Windows 8 compat mode, the program exits with a very mysterious 127 exit code.
Some debugging showed that this occurs during a call to HeapFree.
In fact, I have had this exact program with nearly every single executable I have compiled with MinGW since the 25H2 update to Windows.
So… I wrote a fuzz-tester for HeapAlloc, HeapReAlloc, and HeapFree, and indeed, without Windows 8 compat mode enabled, one of these functions (it’s somewhat random) would sporadically exit the program with the code 127 after a while (usually when there are many small memory blocks allocated). I’m not exactly a reverse engineer, so I’ve really no idea what Microsoft have broken here, but it is very strange.
In fact, I can force a 127 exit code simply by HeapReAlloc’ing to a larger size and then HeapFree’ing the old pointer. This is *incorrect* behaviour for HeapFree. If someone tries freeing an invalid pointer, it should return `false` to indicate the failure to the caller rather than exiting the program with a mysterious code, as according to the documentation (which it does correctly do prior to the 24H2 update, yes the 24H2 even though the fuzz-tester only fails in 25H2 for whatever reason).
For a temporary fix, I reimplemented the malloc, realloc, and free functions in my libc version using VirtualAlloc and VirtualFree which makes everything work fine without compat mode, but it comes at something of a performance sacrifice. The jemalloc library works great too, but it’s got an annoying build system.
Perhaps there could be Winareo tweak reverting/fixing the offending DLL once someone finds it.
Anyway, I should probably post this whole issue elsewhere at some point, but I’ve never really encountered an issue like this before so I wouldn’t know where to start.
By the way, I’m really liking the new dark theme. Although it could definitely still do with some improvements. I’m finding the borders in tables and around the “Description” box jarringly bright, and the field selector in “Elevated Shortcut” is still displaying in light mode.
I know it’s not too hard for people to this manually, but it would be kinda nice to have a button which disabled the Edge app entirely. It’s possible to do this in a restorable manner without breaking Edge WebView for embedded stuff in the Start menu.
And finally, thanks for all the effort you put into this. It’s really helped me manage using Windows for the stuff I still need it for. All the popups, nuisances, and other stuff would kill my productivity with my ADHD if there was no way to disable it. Also, I really like the option to save the login backgrounds (before, I was screenshotting them into Yandex to find the original image just so I could have them downloaded).
<3
