The American Girls Dress Designer

This page contains notes for the game The American Girls Dress Designer.

An error occurred while opening a window.#

On Windows NT-based operating systems, the game crashes upon clicking any button that invokes a popup window, namely "Print", "Select Dress" or "Quit". As it turns out, it was due to how the developers used the "CreateWindowExA" API call, using 0x1 or 1 as the hMenu handle even if it doesn't apparently exist within the EXE:

CreateWindowExA(WS_EX_CLIENTEDGE,
                "AfxFrameOrView42s",
                "SelDrsLd",
                WS_CLIPCHILDREN,
                463,
                233,
                514,
                433,
                0x000000000022095C,
                0x1, //this hMenu value is what's causing the game to fail
                0x0000000000400000,
                NULL
                );

DOS-based Windows systems seem to treat these invalid values as a non-issue, yet on NT-based operating systems this is a cause for a crash. Changing 0x1 to NULL or 0 fixes the issue.