After updated to NEURON 7.4 on MSWin

[breakwave922]

Hi,

We have to simple model which was working fine in NEURON 7.3 or other older version. After I installed NEURON 7.4, compiling was successful, but when I run the program, it gave me an problem of nrniv.exe, showing "Entry Point Not Found-The procedure entry point hoc_register_prop_size could not be located in the dynamic link library \XXX(program folder path)\nrnmech.dll''.
Can someone help me to solve this problem?
Thanks in advance.

[ted]

Need more information.
1. First, did you uninstall NEURON 7.3 before installing 7.4?
2. If your answer to 1 is "yes", did you do that with the Uninstaller that is in the NEURON program group?
3. If your answer to 2 is "yes", does the neurondemo program work correctly? Select its "Release" demo and click on Init & Run. Does the graph with all the calcium currents show a bunch of traces?
4. If your answers to 3 are "yes and yes", before you tried recompiling your model's mod files with mknrndll, did you first delete the nrnmech.dll and all .o and .c files that had been generated the last time you compiled them?

[breakwave922]

Hi, Ted,

Thank you so much for your reply. I just did all the tests according to your suggestion. As follows:
1. I uninstalled NEURON 7.3 with the uninstaller in the NEURON program group, and then installed 7.4 on my computer, which is based on Windows10. This didn't solve my problem. But this time, the error "Entry Point Not Found-The procedure entry point hoc_register_prop_size could not be located in the dynamic link library \XXX(program folder path)\nrnmech.dll'' didn't pop up. The error is instead saying "couldn't find cell_template.hoc file", but this hoc file is actually existing in the same folder.
2. When I run the "Release" demo, I also got error, showing "syntax error in C:/nrn/demo/release.hoc near line 13..."

When used the same programs for a very long time for students in class. But when I updated to 7.4, I don't know why I got such error.

[breakwave922]

Hi, Ted,

I just return to NEURON 7.3, it is working well with my program.
But I still get the same issue when running that release.hoc in nrn73w64\demo folder.
Do I need to compile the files in mod files in nrn73w64\demo\release folder?
Thank you.

[ted]

Code: Select all

Do I need to compile the files in mod files in nrn73w64\demo\release folder?

No, leave them alone.

Tell me, when you just start NEURON by double clicking on the nrngui icon, what is the first line that NEURON prints to its output window? Should look something like this:
NEURON -- Release 7.3 (1014:d5bf062d0b56) 2014-01-02
(exact numbers will differ, of course)

But I still get the same issue when running that release.hoc in nrn73w64\demo folder.

You're not actually clicking on any file in that folder, are you? The correct way to proceed is to double click on neurondemo, then click on the radio button labeled "Release", and then on the RunControl's Init & Run button.

Also, please tell me where your program files are located. Exactly what is the path of the folder that contains your hoc and mod files?

[breakwave922]

Tell me, when you just start NEURON by double clicking on the nrngui icon, what is the first line that NEURON prints to its output window? Should look something like this:
NEURON -- Release 7.3 (1014:d5bf062d0b56) 2014-01-02
(exact numbers will differ, of course)

For 7.3, yes, I got this similar look: Release 7.3 (980:01f9410e41bc) 2013-10-31. For 7.4, I also got the same look with number differences: Release 7.4 (1351:8f462ea7e030) 2015-07-21.

You're not actually clicking on any file in that folder, are you? The correct way to proceed is to double click on neurondemo, then click on the radio button labeled "Release", and then on the RunControl's Init & Run button.

Ted, could you please tell me where is this neurondemo file? I searched for all the folders in C:/nrn73w64, but couldn't find it.

Also, please tell me where your program files are located. Exactly what is the path of the folder that contains your hoc and mod files?

I put my program on the desktop, temporarily. I also moved to I:\ drive, for testing, after I saw your suggestion. But still, under 7.4, I got error, saying that "can't open .hoc file".

[ted]

Ted, could you please tell me where is this neurondemo file? I searched for all the folders in C:/nrn73w64, but couldn't find it.

So you were literally diving into NEURON's installation tree and clicking on release.hoc? That isn't going to work.

Under Win 7 and before, installing NEURON creates a folder called NEURON on the Desktop. It also creates a NEURON program group in the Start menu. If you don't see the folder or the program group, I'm not quite sure what to tell you to do.

[breakwave922]

Under Win 7 and before, installing NEURON creates a folder called NEURON on the Desktop. It also creates a NEURON program group in the Start menu. If you don't see the folder or the program group, I'm not quite sure what to tell you to do.

Sorry, Ted, I just understood what you meant. Yes, I have a folder on the Desktop, and clicking NEURON Demo and Release works for me, under 7.4. But for my program, I still couldn't make it work under 7.4, which was working fine with 7.3.

[ted]

OK, and just to be quite sure, after you installed 7.4, you deleted all of your old nrnmech.dll and .o and .c files, then ran mknrndll to compile your mod files. Then you tried your hoc program, and got the "Entry Point Not Found" error message?

Did mknrndll generate any error messages when it compiled your mod files?

[breakwave922]

OK, and just to be quite sure, after you installed 7.4, you deleted all of your old nrnmech.dll and .o and .c files, then ran mknrndll to compile your mod files. Then you tried your hoc program, and got the "Entry Point Not Found" error message?

Ted,

Yes, I deleted all the old dll,.o and .c files and ran mknrndll to compile mod files, and then got "Entry Point Not Found" error message initially. But at that time, I suspected maybe because I didn't uninstall 7.3, according to your suggestion. Then I uninstalled 7.3, and installed 7.4, even restarted the computer sometimes to try my luck. That "Entry Point Not Found" error message was gone, however, I got "can't open XX.hoc" error message when I clicked my main hoc file trying to run the program. Note that, I uninstalled and installed 7.4 several times, none of them works for me. But every time when I was back to 7.3, it worked for sure.

Did mknrndll generate any error messages when it compiled your mod files?

No. mknrndll didn't generate any error message when it compiled files. Compiling files was always successful.

[hines]

"Entry Point Not Found" error message was gone

Yes. Getting rid of the left over *.c, *.o, *.dll from the previous version before doing mknrndll with the new version always solves that problem.

"can't open XX.hoc" error message when I clicked my main hoc

After you start your main.hoc by clicking on it and after the error message. Check your current working folder from the interpreter window by typing the command
print getcwd()
Is that the folder that contains XX.hoc? I can't quite remember for windows but I think
system("ls")
will print a listing of the folder contents. If XX.hoc is there, does
load_file("XX.hoc")
give the same problem? Can you show the line in your main hoc file which results in an attempted load of XX.hoc?

It is certainly an unexpected puzzle why this problem appears in 7.4 but not 7.3. I do not have Windows 10 available to me but I can see if the file problem occurs on
WIndows 8 and diagnose from there if you send me a zip file with all needed hoc,ses,mod files. Unfortunately, I am away from that computer until next Tuesday so
the simplest thing may be to use 7.3 til after SFN.

[breakwave922]

Hi, Hines,
Thank you so much for you reply.

After you start your main.hoc by clicking on it and after the error message. Check your current working folder from the interpreter window by typing the command
print getcwd()
Is that the folder that contains XX.hoc?

Tying print getcwd(), under 7.4, I got "C:/WINDOWS/system32", whereas under 7.3, I got the path which includes the main hoc file that I clicked.
Is this the reason that 7.4 doesn't work for me?
I will send you the zip folder to your email.
Thanks again for helping.

[hines]

I did not have a problem running your code with Windows 8 in the following fashion.
start the bash terminal
#cd to the folder that contains your mod and hoc files
mknrndll
nrniv ActionPotential.hoc

I used NEURON -- VERSION 7.4 (1316:353c7c3ecd8d) 2015-04-03

I could also launch by double clicking the ActionPotential.hoc file.

I do not have a WInodows 10 virtual box guest yet, but when it becomes availabie, I will create one and try this again.
At present I'm unable to reproduce your problem.

[kushmerick]

Update: After associating hoc files with nrniv.exe, the problem was fixed.

Old:
I have the same problem. I am using Windows 10. Was using Neuron 7.3 and updated to latest 64-bit version for windows using the installer: nrn-7.4.x86_64-w64-mingw32-setup.

In the previous version, load_file() functioned as if the current working diretory was automatically set to the folder where the hoc file was loated. Now, print getcwd() returns c:/windows/system32, instead of the directory in which the hoc file was located.

I start the execution by double clicking the hoc file name in the windows file explorer. I have not yet been able to associate the .hoc extension with nrniv.exe, so I just choose it from the list of options.

I confess that I installed 7.4 before properly uninstalling 7.3. But I have since uninstalled everything, rebooted, installed 7.4, and rebooted again as per instructions above.

[hines]

I do have a windows 10 virtual box and was able to reproduce the same problem a few weeks ago in response to an independent email question.
Basically, my hypothesis is that there is a leftover registry entry from some earlier installation that did not get eliminated on uninstall and new versions
use different registry entries that are more appropriate. Anyway, here is my reply about that problem which successfully fixed it on the user's machine.

------------

All of the other results from your email make sense to me. I.e. launching nrniv or neuron
does not by itself change directories to c:\nrn\demo and hence the failure of being able
to find the ses file.

I do get your result when I change the properties to default open with nrniv and then
try to 'open with' neuron.exe. So try the following.

Right click on the demo.hoc file and select 'Properties'
In the 'Opens with: field, press the "Change" button.
Browse to c:\nrn\bin\neuron.exe and select that. and then press OK.
Press OK for the original 'demo Properties' panel.
Double click the demo.hoc file. Does it work?

I believe the process of double clicking on the file is supposed to move to that folder
and then, from there, execute the neuron.exe, with demo.hoc as the argument.

There was a major change to the setup.exe installer builder in March 2015
http://www.neuron.yale.edu/hg/neuron/nr ... d13e04585f
in which most registry entries changed from the top level of HKCU to underneath
HKCU's Software\Classes\
It was this kind of change that made the icons associated with the hoc files to appear
and double clicking a hoc file start to work.