Stability issues with Vista/Access

[Pat Hartman]

I just got a new Vista PC last week and got to doing some "real" work on it
this weekend. I am very disappointed with the compatibility issues that
Access has.

I am having more than the "normal" number of abends with A2003 running under
Vista. The error reporting tool got a real workout over the weekend. MS
probably got 30 error reports from me. It got so bad at one point that if I
tried to view code for the form that kept corrupting, Access would just fade
away - isn't Vista pretty? I would have preferred more people working on
stability and compatibility than making it "pretty". The funny thing is, if
I opened a different code module, I could switch to the problem one once I
was in the VBA window. By the way, this is a database that I have been
working with for over a year on XP/A2003 and have not had any corruption
issues with the application since I removed the timer events from all the
forms (don't ask - I didn't do it).

Another bug I ran into over the weekend involved non-standard column names.
I inherited a database with names like Cost High % and Bunch / Stems and
A2007 doesn't handle them properly. When typing in a code module -
Me.cost - the name comes up but when you select it, it falls in without
square brackets so it generates an error. However, names with just spaces,
fall in with underscores. With A2003, the names all come in with
underscores.

Luckily, I also have A2007 installed and was able to switch to that (which
wasn't much better) but I can't keep switching back and forth. Life is too
short to spend it waiting for the various versions to re-install themselves
(somewhat improved with SP1) and with trying to figure out what is causing
the corruption along with trying to keep two completely different Access UIs
in my head at the same time. A2003 by day - A2007 by night - I am too old
for this. My head is going to explode!

 

[Robert]

Try SP3 and this hot fix...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945674

Robert J H

 

[Robert]

Try SP3 and the following hot fix...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945674

 

[Pat Hartman]

Thanks. I have SP3 but I don't think I have the hotfix. I'll check when I
get home. I did find something on Allen Browne's wonderful site that may
shed some light on the issue. Apparently, A2003 isn't actually able to
re-register itself under Vista out of the box. It leaves the A2007 library
reference. I'll try one of the suggested fixes - probably creating
shortcuts to allow Access to run in Administrator mode.

 

[Pat Hartman]

For anyone who finds this later, I discovered the problem. I had both A2007
(installed first) and A2003 on the machine. As we all know the various
versions of Access do not play well together and each time you switch they
need to reassert their dominance over the registry. Well, VISTA was
preventing A2003 from taking over the registry from A2007 so A2003 was
running by using the A2007 internal library. There are several ways to
solve the problem with none of them being totally satisfactory. The one I
settled on was to create two shortcuts on my desktop. One to start A207 and
run as an administrator and the other starts A2003 and runs as an
administrator. This allows the version you are opening to modify the
registry if necessary. For your users, you would create separate shortcuts
to start each application. For new development, this is not a problem but
for existing applications this is of course totally undesirable so companies
will not push out A2007 under VISTA unless all apps can run with it. For my
purposes, it works fine since I am a developer and I know which version of
Access I want to use at any given time.