Dreamweaver cs3 crashes when opening file, solved msvcr80.dll

I was about to reinstall my entire OS to fix this issue, then one last attempt to determine the cause and I found it.  If you recently started having problems with Dreamweaver CS3 or any version for that matter, crashing when you attempted to open certain files, then I found the cause.  Its in your code, not Adobe's

How it began

I was working on a new project that was a clone of another existing project I created.  In the process I dragged over the old code, and then started removing features and pages that would not be needed with the new site.  Finally I got to the page where I would be handling Server Errors.  I dragged the file to Dreamweaver and then Dreawaver completely shutdown.  I thought that maybe I accidently hit the close button during a drag and drop operation, so I tried again.  Nope same thing.  I went to Event View to see if there was an error.  There was

Faulting application name: Dreamweaver.exe, version: 9.0.0.3481, time stamp: 0x4600622f
Faulting module name: MSVCR80.dll, version: 8.0.50727.9659, time stamp: 0x5c7d6589
Exception code: 0xc000000d
Fault offset: 0x00014458
Faulting process id: 0x22a8
Faulting application start time: 0x01d56b66ca2da15e
Faulting application path: C:Program Files (x86)AdobeAdobe Dreamweaver CS3Dreamweaver.exe
Faulting module path: C:WINDOWSWinSxSx86_microsoft.vc80.crt_1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b_8.0.50727.9659_none_d08cfd96442b25ccMSVCR80.dll
Report Id: 9cfd13d7-0a54-4be3-aa4d-4436841f7f23
Faulting package full name: 
Faulting package-relative application ID: 

Attempted Solutions

I first thought that maybe the file was corrupt. So I ran windows system file checker (SFC from command prompt ).  It showed no files were corrupt.  I thought that maybe this specific file wasn't one windows would check from corruption, so I compared the file to the same file on another machine.  Using a Hash Value of the two files, to compare the bits, they were the same.  So the file was fine.  This seemed to be an error almost by design.

I searched online for solutions but everywhere seemed to point me to a complete reinstall of my system, which would be a pain.  Backup all my data. Reinstall Windows 10, and then reinstall all my software and settings.  So I started the long process of backing up all my data to 2 machines, just in case the first backup was bad.  Then just before I was about to reinstall windows, I tried one more time to find the reason.

Problem File

The file that was causing my problems was a very simple ASPX page that would be a user friendly page in case of a server error.  

The page in question is 500error.aspx. Every other page on this project would load to Dreamweaver just fine.

My theory was there was something in the code that was causing the error.  So I started removing bits of code, and attempting to load the page after small changes.  It would still fail. Then I removed a reference to a CSS file from the code and it loaded.  The line I removed was

<link href="styling.css" rel="stylesheet" >

But this is not how I normally do this.  Normally I reference my CSS from the root of the site like this

<link href="/styling.css" rel="stylesheet" >

But in Dreamweaver when you reference the root, dreamweaver is not able to find the file.  I then compared this line to other pages in the project. Every other page in the site was referencing the CSS by the root, meaning upon loading the file in Dreamweaver, the CSS would not be parsed.  So when Dreamweaver attempted to load my CSS it would crash.  I searched the CSS file for any code bugs.  The CSS was from another project, and was a little bloated ( 5000 lines of code).  I intended to remove the unused classes before launch, but decided to go ahead and do my cleanup now.  In the process I found an extra character at the end of my css file.  Once this was removed.  The file loaded fine.  I had found the source of the error.

Final Conclusion

Normally editing software is very liberal in handling code errors.  In this case Dreamweaver wasn't going to accept this.  If any of you run into crashes like this check your code, and referenced files.  Its likely that Dreamweaver is crashing due to a parsing error as a result of your code bug.

Categories associated with Dreamweaver cs3 crashes when opening file, solved msvcr80.dll

Discussion