Becker, Thomas J (ISD, IT) wrote:
I have upgraded Ethereal to V 0.10.12 and WinPcap 3.1 on Windows XP with
SP1. Every time I start Ethereal I get a messages stating it is now
registering dissectors. After that every thing proceed normally.
Yes. That's Ethereal's "splash screen". Many applications that take a
noticeable time to start up put up a "splash screen" early in the
startup process, so that the user gets feedback that the application is
starting up (at least some versions of Acrobat Reader do that on Windows).
The Ethereal splash screen shows other messages, but some of them might
be displayed for such a short period of time that you don't see them,
because that stage of startup takes little time.
Is this normal behavior?
As others have noted, yes.
Why must it register the dissectors every time?
Because
1) for dissectors built into Ethereal, we haven't implemented a scheme
in which, for example, Ethereal can be run with a special flag that
writes out the information entered into its data structures for those
dissectors in a form that can be quickly read in, so that the
installation process can run Ethereal with that flag and install a file
with that information (which might be worth doing if calling the
dissectors to register themselves takes a long time; it takes less than
a second on my 1.5 GHz PowerBook, but it presumably takes longer on
older machines);
2) for plugin dissectors, Ethereal doesn't know until it starts up what
dissectors there are to register.
