Thursday, January 24th, 2008
HHD Software’s Free Hex Editor
HHD Software offers up a free hex editor aptly called ‘Free Hex Editor’. The version I installed was the latest, 3.12 which was released on 10/12/2005. It is not, in any way shape or form compatible with Vista, so don’t install it. If you do you may experience sporadic crashes in the explorer.exe process. Vista recovers from this gracefully but it’s still very annoying. I’ve had this installed for a month or so, it took me a while to figure out what was causing it. I finally broke the crash down in Visual Studio and found a dll installed with FHE latched into the shell was the cause.
Faulting application Explorer.EXE, version 6.0.6000.16549, time stamp 0x46d230c5, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6000.16386, time stamp 0x4549bdc9, exception code 0xc0000005, fault offset 0x00042e7b, process id 0×1368, application start time 0x01c854ca4f2daea0.
It’s too bad too, the editor is pretty good. Hopefully they’ll have an update at some point. You also might try removing the offending dll or unregistering it, I decided not to waste the time with that though and just uninstalled.
UPDATED – from the comments, HHD has an updated version. I haven’t had a chance to install it yet but feel free to give it a wirl on Vista or Win7 and please post back on how it goes.
February 7th, 2008 at 6:14 am
Jeff said:
1) HDD -> HHD
2) I’ve got same problems (it crashes) – so i contacted the HHD software. I’ve asked them about Vista support. They promissed me that new Hex editor will be released in february 2008 and it will support Vista. Heh, the editor is cool and i’m waiting that they will fix these annoying bugs.
February 12th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Jim Mathies said:
Thanks! updated.
February 12th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
gunman said:
nice.. thx
February 12th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
gunman said:
October 5th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Alex said:
Jim,
I’ve just located your blog and found this post about our editor.
It would be great if you could download and try the latest version of our editor and update your post at least a bit, because now it not only supports Vista, but makes use of most Windows 7 features, among a lot of other cool additions.
Hope you still monitor this topic.
The latest version of the product is available for download here:
http://www.hhdsoftware.com/Products/home/hex-editor-free.html