24 bit bitmap image error message

[secretcodebreaker]

A 'volunteer' wrote a Steganography program for my Secret Code Breaker web site free download list. The purpose of the program is to teach the user about steganography, so it uses a very simple monoalphabetic encryption scheme (Cryptogram) and a bit map image file. It is not something one would use to create a secure encryption system.

The program is written in C++ and it uses the following files normally found on a Windows system.

comdlg32.ocx
asycfilt.dll
comcat.dll
msvbvm60.dll
oleaut32.dll
olepro32.dll
vb6stkit.dll
gdi32.dll

The programmer said that "There is a call to the driver to determine if it is 24 bit."

The program was successfully run on 12 different systems during Beta test.

I recently tried to run it on my wife's ThinkPad (Windows XP) and it failed to run as a result of an error message saying that the image file was not a 24 bit file. In fact it was. The image file was the image file (included with the download) that was used in Beta test.

That wasn't the first time that I've had trouble running a program on my wife's ThinkPad that runs fine on my IBM desktop, so I wasn't very concerned. My wife has no interest in learning about Steganography.

During the 6 month period that the program has been available for download, the page describing it has had about 1800 visitors. I didn't set up a way to measure the actual downloads of this individual program, so I don't have a figure for how many visitors to the site actually downloaded this specific program. The average number of downloads for the entire list is about 4,000/month, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were close to 1800 visitors that downloaded this program. How many installed and ran it is another question.

Then last month I received an e-mail from a user who had downloaded the program and got this same error message. I'm sure this has happened to others and they didn't bother to e-mail me, but it's probably not very many.

Anyway, in an attempt to determine the cause, I did a file by file comparison (file size and date last modified) of each of the files in the list above between my Windows XP system and my wife's Windows XP system (both have the same version number.) I did not find any differences.

The programmer is at a loss to explain why this is occurring and has no further suggestions of what to do to determine the cause.

Can anyone on this forum, who is familar with the vagaries of Windows, offer some suggestions?

Anyone wanting to 'give it a go' can download the zip file of the files at

http://secretcodebreaker.com/codes.html

Go down the list and click on "Secret Code Breaker Steganography Program" and just follow the links to the place where you can activate the download.

Thanks