Can't spawn 32-bit process from 64-bit console

[chrisoldwood]

This may already have been fixed in a later version but I didn't find the answer until I had already worked out what the problem was and uninstalled ansicon to check. Maybe my particular words will help someone else searching to track this down quicker 😄 . Also while Chocolatey is still publishing the older version I assume others may hit this.

Update: so this is almost certainly a duplicate of #61 which is dated 2013. Not sure how I managed to miss that when originally browsing the issues list! 😕 .

I installed ansicon via Chocolatey, so 1.66 I guess,

> choco install ansicon -y

Then I started getting problems with our build scripts which install both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Python. The 64-bit versions worked but the 32-bit python.exe and pip.exe processes were dying on start-up. I could also reproduce this problem by trying to spawn a 32-bit command prompt from the 64-bit version, e.g. from C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe:

> C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cmd.exe /c echo Hello
<nothing>

The Python example goes like this:

> PowerShell -Command "& { [Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12; (New-Object Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.7.5/python-3.7.5.exe', 'python3.7.5-32.exe') }"
> start /wait python3.7.5-32.exe /passive
> "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\python.exe" --version
<nothing>
> "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\Scripts\pip.exe" --version
<nothing>

In the Windows Event Log you can see the following kinds of errors when the process fails to start:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Application Error
Event ID:      1000
Task Category: (100)
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
...
Description:
Faulting application name: cmd.exe, version: 10.0.17763.592, time stamp: 0x7652a5c2
Faulting module name: unknown, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x00000000
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00022350
Faulting process id: 0x30a0
Faulting application start time: ...
Faulting application path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cmd.exe
Faulting module path: unknown
Report Id: ...
Faulting package full name: 
Faulting package-relative application ID: