gtk_init outside main

[Moser Markus <moses landshut org>]

Hi!

I am writing plugins for a proprietary CAD-program (Pro/Engineer).
The target platforms currently are HP UX, SGI IRIX, IBM AIX and Windows NT.
Existing code (not from me) is written in C using TCL scripts for GUIs that 
cannot be generated with the API of the CAD-program, which only provides 
menus and simple text input/output for user interaction.
Communication with the TCL-scripts is done with temporary files (sigh).

As I want to get rid of this TCL-stuff, I decided to use GTK as a replacement.
Pro/Engineer gives you the choice to write your plugins as standalone 
programs ("exe"s) or dynamic libraries ("dll"s). As EXEs communicate with 
ProE via RPC, we'd prefer to make DLLs (where the functions are called 
directly) for better performance.

When ProE loads a dll, it seems that main() does not get called. Instead, 
user_initialize(), where the ProE-stuff shall be initialized, is called 
directly. So I moved the gtk_init()-call from main() to user_initialize(), 
giving NULLs as arguments.
And here finally comes my problem: This works fine as an exe, but lets ProE 
crash somewhere else as dll.
When I comment out the gtk_init()-call, all is fine as long as no 
gtk-function is called. When the call is active, a simple ProE-operation 
crashes that has nothing to do with my code. So I assume, gtk_init modifies 
memory where it shouldn't.
But: This only is true for HP UX, on the other platforms I could not 
reproduce this or a similar problem, yet.

I tried to feed gtk_init() with fake parameters (argc and argv are not 
present in user_initialize()), but this had no effect.
Then I tried to compile newer versions of gtk (1.3.15 and 2.3.0, currently 
1.2.10), but they seem to require "pkgconfig", which didn't comile on my HP 
UX in turn.

I compiled gtk and glib (versions 1.2.10) with the native HP UX compiler and 
the +z-flag to produce position independent code and link everything 
statically. At first I compiled with gcc, but there were crashes. I assume 
they were caused from incompatitibility with the ProE-libararies which I also 
have to link against and which are certainly not compiled with gcc.
And: glib is compiled without thread-support. I tried pth-1.4.1, but the 
glib-configure-script didn't find it.

I know, chances are few that someone has the same problem than I have, but 
it's worth a try. :-)

Thank you for any help,

Markus Moser