Blog / Mysterious Windows Bug Fix with 1.2.3 Update

2016-12-02

Cryptomator 1.2.3 for Windows fixes a mysterious bug, commonly known as system error 53 or 67. Well, it’s not that mysterious anymore, but this particular error had been haunting us from the beginning! Cycor on GitHub (almost casually) pointed out in GitHub Issue 210 that he found the cause of system error 53/67 after a few months of experiencing the issue himself.

Apparently, there is a Windows Registry entry responsible for listing available network providers called ProviderOrder. Cryptomator’s virtual drive is based on WebDAV. Therefore, a missing webclient value in the ProviderOrder registry key would lead to such error. We were stunned, desperate, and hopeless for many months, because we were never able to reproduce the issue. We added things like the IPv6 literal option (which is probably going to be removed in a future version) or thought that some firewall was responsible for the error. But nope! Clearly some applications modify this registry entry, because a clean Windows installation doesn’t have the webclient value missing. Shame on them! 🔔

We fixed this issue by patching the Cryptomator for Windows installer and added some code that adds the webclient value back to the ProviderOrder key, if it is missing. The registry key can be found at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider\Order. If you’re a fellow developer and stumbled on this blog post while having the same issue and even using Inno Setup yourself, you can find the code on GitHub.

Big thanks to Cycor for finding the solution to this weird bug! 😄

Furthermore, version 1.2.3 (also available for Mac and Linux) includes other improvements:

  • Saved password can now be forgotten by deselecting the checkbox. [Windows/Mac]
  • WebDAV server keeps running after unlocking a vault even if mounting fails.
  • Log files don’t contain debug-level information per default anymore, added debug mode in settings.

What’s next?

We released CryptoFS in version 1.0.0, which is now ready to be integrated in our main application Cryptomator. The next minor release Cryptomator 1.3 will mainly include a “heart transplant” with the integration of CryptoFS. This is a requirement before we can integrate FUSE/Dokany, which is currently scheduled for version 1.4.