Texify crashes after Miktex update

Question

Today I ran the update on my MikTeX 2.9 install on Windows.

After the update, the following started to happen: if I run texify on my document (a MWE consisting of the bare preamble and a single word in the document), the compilation runs fine (I can see it completed in the log) but latex.exe crashes (reported by Windows) before texify returns; similarly, pdflatex.exe crashes after the compilation is completed when run by texify --pdf. The issue disappears if I run texify from an elevated account.

Both latex.exe and pdflatex.exe compile my document without crashes if I run them on their own, even as a regular user.

I have checked the regular user's permission in the most obvious places. I have run initexmf --dump both as admin and as a regular user. Same with "update formats" in Settings. I also checked the log file as produced by pdflatex standalone and when called by texify; the only difference is that when called by texify, full paths are used for all the files.

PdfLatex version:

MiKTeX-pdfTeX 2.9.5700 (1.40.16) (MiKTeX 2.9) Copyright (C) 1982 D. E. Knuth, (C) 1996-2014 Han The Thanh TeX is a trademark of the American Mathematical Society. compiled with zlib version 1.2.8; using 1.2.8 compiled with libpng version 1.6.17; using 1.6.17 compiled with poppler version 0.32.0 compiled with jpeg version 8.4

Any idea what else I could check?

Answer 1

So I found the issue. My command line was using the system-wide pdflatex.exe from Program Files, while texify.exe was using the version in the user's appdata\roaming folder. I just copied the exe from the global folder to the local one, and the error disappeared.

The binaries were not identical, although they both reported to be the same version.