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I'm trying to use biber with biblatex under windows xp. However, when I run it with any argument including biber --help it breaks with the same error message:

Biber/Utils.pm did not return a true value at Biber/Internals.pm line 9.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at Biber/Internals.pm line 9.
Compilation failed in require at (eval 31) line 2.
        ...propagated at C:/strawberry/perl/lib/base.pm line 94.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at Biber.pm line 6.
Compilation failed in require at script/biber-MSWIN line 18.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at script/biber-MSWIN line 18.

The md5 checksum for biber.exe is: 5eaf7f368d940024869231a34f6f9e7f

I do not have Perl installed, but understand that this isn't needed.

Caramdir
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aghsmith
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    Is this still the case with the latest binary? This usually means that the first run of the binary was interrupted so it didn't unpack properly. Try emptying your biber cache (see the biber manual), download the binary again and run it once with "--help" to unpack it. Don't interrupt it until the prompt returns as it's unpacking. After the first run of a new binary, it doesn't need to unpack again and will be faster. – PLK Nov 02 '11 at 09:30
  • Where did you get the binary from and what is your Tex distribution? If you are using MikTex, try updating all packages by running the Update and Admin Update (and maybe read this question about MikTex setup). – matth Nov 08 '11 at 16:13
  • I just downloaded a zipped binary from the biber site. My Miktex distribution was version 2.8. I had run all the updates on this though. – aghsmith Dec 02 '11 at 13:29
  • Thank you for that question! I can't understand why it was closed... – Olivier May 15 '12 at 13:46

1 Answers1

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I have now resolved this matter. Though rather brute force, I decided to be contemporary and uninstall MikTeX 2.8, to replace it with version 2.9. Version 2.9 came packed with a functioning version of Biber. This seems to have resolved some other issues I was having also.

An additional fix that I found was to delete the files unpacked by biber in the Temp directory as mentioned here. The temp files may be found under the path:

C:\Users\%USER NAME%\AppData\Local\Temp
user29291
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aghsmith
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