%1 is not a valid Win32 application

[DSC]

Hi

I am having problems with running the 64-Bit version of recent Sublime Text 3 releases. The system where it needs to run has Windows XP Pro 64-Bit installed.

The 64-Bit version of Sublime Text v3157 runs on the system with no problem. But more recent versions of Sublime Text, like version 3207 or 3208 produce the following error:

CreateProcess failed; code 193.
%1 is not a valid Win32 application.

I can install and run the 32-Bit version of Sublime Text v3208 on the same system, but the 64-Bit version produces the error. The 64-Bit version installs but it does not run.

What has changed?

I have tried different things to solve this problem. Among them was to put the path name of Sublime Text in the registry of Windows in quotation marks because it contains spaces. It did not help.

Why is the 64-Bit version of Sublime Text having problems running on a 64-Bit operating system while the 32-Bit version of it has no problems?

It would be great if the 64-Bit version would also run because it’s faster.

[wbond]

I can’t be sure, but I don’t know if we’ve ever explicitly supported WIndows XP Pro 64 bit. I’m no expert, but I believe that the 64 bit version of XP used a different SDK/API than 64 bit versions of Vista and Windows 7.

Either way, I’m not sure we’ll be putting much effort into this now. Windows XP has been unsupported by Microsoft for over 5 years now, and the OS is 18 years old.

[DSC]

Thank you for your reply.

The last 64-Bit version of Sublime Text that I was able to install and run on the system was Build 3157. Build 3177 may also have worked but I did not update to that version.

Beginning with Build 3207 I experienced the problem mentioned in my first post. It may have begun earlier but I experienced it first with Build 3207.

So, the 64-Bit version of Sublime Text did run on Windows XP Pro 64-Bit. Only recently has it stopped to run. Something has changed, maybe since Build 3200.

The 32-Bit version of Sublime Text does run on the system, but it’s slower. It would be great if the 64-Bit version would run again.

The error message is confusing because it states that “%1 is not a valid Win32 application.” Well, the 64-Bit executable of Sublime Text is not supposed to be a Win32 application, so why complain about it. Or the message is related to the parameter “%1”, whatever that may be, but why does then the message occur even if you try to start the executable directly?

I went through the registry of Windows and added quotation marks to all the path names of Sublime Text, because it contains a space character. Sometimes this can be the cause that the latter part of the path name is taken as a parameter. But doing so did not help solving the problem.

Can it be that something has changed in regard to the compiling of the 64-Bit executable? Is it possible to review the compiling process and do the needed adjustments to make it work again?

I know that there are newer versions of Windows but for this system Windows XP Pro 64-Bit is just fine. It’s fast, easy to handle and has many applications installed on it, some of which would not run on recent Windows systems.

I hope your support for this version of Windows will continue for some while.

I bought a license for Sublime Text a few years ago. It’s great software. Thanks for developing it.

[wbond]

Okay, I didn’t realize it ever worked on XP 64, sorry for the confusion.

The %1 is not a valid Win32 application is a standard Windows error message indicating that it the program can’t be run for some reason. In this case, I think it has to do with the compiler toolchain that was used to create the exe.

During the dev cycle for Sublime Text 3.2, we switched to using cross-compilation. This means that when we build the executables we don’t have to have a handful of different machines and environments running. My hunch is that during that process, something about the 64 bit builds became incompatible with Windows XP.

I don’t think we’ll be restoring Windows XP support in future releases since some of our dependencies dropped support for it. For now Sublime Text 3.1.1 should work on XP 64bit. I doubt we’d release a new 64bit build of 3.2 to add Windows XP support back in, so you may just have to use 32 bit builds to get 3.2.

As I mentioned above, I believe the next build of Sublime Text will likely drop support for Windows XP altogether, along with some older builds of OS X (10.7 and 10.8). Linux compatibility has recently been changed since we now require GTK 3 instead of GTK 2. While we do try to support things for a long time, at some point we have to break backwards compatibility to move other things forward.

[DSC]

Is there a place where one can download previous versions of Sublime Text 3, maybe a FTP server to which one can connect to?

It would be helpful if I could find the last running 64-Bit version of Sublime Text 3 to install it on the mentioned system.

Thanks.

[deathaxe]

You just need to replace the build number in the download link.