Corrupted(?) Menus in Access 2000

[Rick Brandt]

I posted this issue a while back (over a year ago?) but thought I would
take another crack at it.

I have one user out of about 250 where my app's custom menu bar does not
work on any of the drop-down menu items. I have four drop-down menus in
the menu bar along with a half dozen or so other top level buttons. The
top-level items all work perfectly, but all of the drop-downs display a
single option labeled "Other".

Something on this guy's PC is apparently corrupting the menu bar. I can
take a file where the menu bar is working perfectly and when I copy this
file to his PC, the menu stops working. When I copy the file back to my PC
the menus are still broken. All of the drop-down items are simply gone
being replaced by the single "Other" entry. When chosen, the "Other" menu
option brings up some sort of "Select Device" dialog.

He is running Office 2000 Pro with at least SR1. When this first happened I
had installed all Office updates I could find and it made no difference.
He has since re-formatted and re-installed everything on the PC (IBM
ThinkPad) and the problem remains.

This was my first app where I had used only a menu bar for the interface
instead of providing a menu form. While this is only affecting one user I
now have no choice but to implement a menu form so that he can use the
program.

Has anyone else ever seen this? I have done multiple Google searches on
this and turned up nothing similar. The only other thing I notice on his
system is that every time you open Access you get the Office Installer
dialog saying that Office is being "configured". I don't know if that is
related, but I at least seem to recall seeing that problem in these forums.

TIA

 

[Peter Miller]

Rick,

Has anyone else ever seen this? I have done multiple Google searches on
this and turned up nothing similar. The only other thing I notice on his
system is that every time you open Access you get the Office Installer
dialog saying that Office is being "configured". I don't know if that is
related, but I at least seem to recall seeing that problem in these forums.

Lets look at the installer-related issue first.

This is an indication that the registry settings for Office 2000 are
not correct (for Office 2000) at the time it launches. There can be
several reasons for this. If he has multiple versions of Access, that
can be a factor. Also, if he has third party registry protection
software (ie as some av products implement) then this type of thing
can occur.

To see whether this is a trivial version issue, or something more
fundamental, before launching Access 2000, take a look at which
application is set to launch for .mdb files to make sure it is indeed
Access 2000 (and that there are not multiple copies of Access
present). Also, if the user is using an Access version checking
utility (ie, a small exe that is associated with the mdb suffix, and
which then launches the appropriate version of Access, it may be coded
badly such that it modifies the registry incorrectly on the fly and
causes this situation where Access 2000 acts as if it needs to be
re-installed.

As to the menu problem, which may or may not be related, it is
possible that another database is interfering with the menus.
Specifically, a badly coded database (or wizard, even) might modify
the n'th menu, rather than the last menu, so everything is fine if you
don't use customized menues, but if you do use them, they get mangled.
You can test to see the names of all open databases, including
wizards. Look for anything non-standard.


Peter Miller
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