Crash on opening 2 files via drag & drop

[visua0]

On my company laptop WinMerge often crashes when I drag 2 files into it. It doesn't happen every time, but it's frequent enough to easily reproduce.
There's nothing special about the files. Usually they are text files smaller than 1MB, but it also happens with other files (including with these crash dumps just now).
I was able to reproduce it on our Windows 11 environment.
Visually what happens is both files are loaded and the diffs are shown, but the window is immediately unresponsive and closes after about a second.
I've had it happen with fresh windows and with windows that already had comparisons open.

W10: WinMergeU.exe.10580.dmp
W11: WinMergeU.exe.15396.dmp

[sdottaka]

Thank you for reporting this.
I found out that the crash occurred during a SHAddToRecentDocs API call in the process of registering the files and folders being compared in the Windows JumpList, but I couldn't figure out the cause.

Since AppVEntSubsystem64.dll appears in the call stack, I assume you are running WinMerge in an App-V environment. Is that correct?

I'm guessing that this problem is occurring because of the App-V environment, or that the paths being compared are special.
Would the problem occur if I were to compare files or folders in a shallow hierarchy on the C drive?

I don't currently have an environment where I can use App-V, so I'll see if there's any way to test it.

[visua0]

Yes you're right, WinMerge is supplied through App-V. Sorry, this completely slipped my mind or I would have mentioned it.
Is there something specific I can do to help you figure this out? Sadly the system is quite locked down so I can't install any tools to debug. I might have some more freedom on this W11 test environment I have temporary access to, but I'm not sure.

[sdottaka]

Although it is not a fundamental fix, commit 8313dcb makes it possible to ignore and continue even if an access violation occurs.