Sysinternals' Portmon: Error 2

Question

When I try to connect to local ports, Computer -> Connect local, using Portmon v. 3.02, I\'m getting an error message, Error 2, in a small error dialog box

Answer 1

"Error 2" is "Cannot find the file specified", that is, cannot find a required DLL file.

Originally, you got this error when you tried to run Portmon from a network location: that broke the security trust, causing Portmon to be untrusted (or perhaps just messing up the search path somehow).

On my copy of Windows 7 64 bit, Microsoft Dependency Walker (depends.exe) tells me that PORTMSYS.SYS (the file created/loaded by Portmon.exe), has unresolved dependencies on ci.dll, clfs.sys, hal.dll and kdcom.dll.

Those are the

code integrity
common log file system
hardware abstraction layer
kernel debugger com

libraries, and they aren't actually missing: if they were, Windows wouldn't boot. However, I don't see a copy of those files in SysWow64. This suggests to me that the problem is not with portman.sys: the problem is with the win32 compatibility layer in Windows 7/64 bit: It doesn't support debug properly.

It is now 2018. There is no 64-bit version of Portmon. Serial ports are a legacy standard. The Windows 7 problem was fixed by the release of Windows 8.1. However, there is a faint chance that some Visual Studio utility or security update back-ported to Windows 7 will fix the problem. Perhaps someone who is familiar with SysWow and debugging will comment.