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Paradox 10 Win2k/XP Problems

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Kliot

Programmer
Jan 10, 2003
622
US

I'm having strange problems with my Paradox applications, I'm running a Win2k Server with a mixed environment of Win2k Pro and XP Pro. workstations. I have made the appropriate opportunistic lock settings on the server. This is an old system and has been working for years.

The problem I'm having is my workstations will occasionally lock up or time out with db read errors or gpf errors. If I kick everyone out of Paradox and delete the *.lck files everything works fine again, tables never get corrupted. This has happened sporadically for a while but it seems to be getting worse and worse.

If anyone has a suggestion I'd appreciate hearing from you.

Perrin
 
Perrin,

It sounds like one of the following:

1. Someone doesn't have their private directory set and BDE is therefore using the first startup directory, e.g. your application directory.

2. There's a workstation that's not using the same .NET file as everyone else.

3. Someone is turning off their PC with Paradox active, instead of using Shutdown _or_ there's a crash event that prevents BDE from automatically removing the locks.

4. There's an intermittent problem with a card, the cabling, or possible even the router.
Hope this helps...

-- Lance
 
Lance,

Thanks for the feedback, its not 1, 2 or 3 I eliminated those possibilities a long time ago. I have been thinking it may be more of a networking problem than a Paradox problem. I've already tried swaping switches and cableing but now you have me thinking about the nic in the server, I'll try swaping it out and see what happens.

Perrin
 
We had an event here where a new XP box was installed and Paradox data placed on it. Occasionally everything would just hang for no apparent reason. All the Paradox settings looked right, the private directories were right, and there was the appropriate number of ".lck" and ".net" files which were erased each time the machine was restarted. We also noticed that a "normal" shutdown was not working correctly either. We finally restricted all but one workstations access and were still getting hung up sporadically.

Turns out it was an auto-update program on the XP box. (this is a Dell Dimension 2350) Seems the box was waiting for Internet access so it could check for upgrades from the vendor site. As soon as we applied the upgrades and disabled the auto-update function everything worked fine. It's been doing well for the last month. This seems to have been the problem.

You'll notice this really had nothing at all do with Paradox.
 
beanbrain,

Good point; with all the background processing services added to XP, it's easy to forget that there may be something else interfering with software and its ability to execute properly.

Thanks for the reminder.

-- Lance
 
Beanbrain,

Thanks for the tip, I'll make sure all machines have autoupdate turned off and see if it makes a difference.

Perrin
 
Hmmmm, I think I'm finally getting somewhere, Paradox has been running smoothly for 3 days now. I was hopeful with the autopudates but that didn't do the trick. I went over the network with a fine toothed comb and found lots of little problems but none that seemed to be affecting Paradox. I finally stumbled upon a problem while trying to copy a large amount of data from the server to a workstation (aprox 7+gb of data), I would get the error message "Specified network name is no longer valid." This is apparently a known bug with 2000 server and XP clients running SP1. A quick search for the error message on google took me to tsb Q329170 on Microsoft's web site that has a hot fix for the problem. I installed the fix and things have been working great since. I'm still puzzled though because I was having problems before I added the XP machines to the network, perhaps it's only a DOCUMENTED problem with sp1.

Just thought I'd pass along what I found.

Perrin
 
Perrin,

Thanks for letting us know. I'll checkout the KB article and see if it's worth mentioning on the site.

-- Lance
 
That info looks interesting - thanks for coming back with it

- Mike I

PS is that you, Lance L. ?
 
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