I have one client using an SME server in anger [E-smith 4.1.2 actually] and today we cam across a weird problem. The client uses and application popular in the Financial Services industry called Synaptic Product Research. It's a highly customised MS-Access based program with a heavyweight licencing application which runs separately and hands out permission to run to workstations trying to open the software. We run teh licencing app on a little Windows machine that does nothing else but hand out licences. The data resides in a directory on a mapped ibay and the application itself runs locally on the workstations.
The data with which 'product researcch' is done is updated monthly from CD.
Until about 5 months ago all the workstations were Windows 98SEII and we never had a moments trouble with this app. The updates were completely transparent - you ran the update program from a little menu that auto-ran when you put the CD in a workstation and it correctly identified where to put the updated material by reading the registry of the workstation.
Once the server was updated you ran a 'client-update' fromt eh server directory on each workstation and that was it.
We then changed on of the workstations for a Windows 2000 Professional portable and found that we could not run the update procedure from it - It stopped and moaned about file access violations. But we just did the update from one of the remaining Win98 machines and didn't think any more about it.
8 weeks ago we updated the remainign workstations to Windows 2000 pro to get round persistent instability problems and now we cannot update the Synaptic software at all.
When we try to run it, it automatically gives us its configuration dialogue, and asks us to tell it where the databases are, even though the entries in the config tables are correct, and we can actually run the individual databases that make up the program's data store on any of the workstations by double clicking them in the mapped drive.
I've tried doing the updates as a normal user and they fail. When I do them as an administrator they apparently work, but the program still won't run and still comes up with the config dialogue with it's infuriatingly correct infiormation.
When I look at the databases on the server they have no Windows security permissions and using the administrator login to change this doesn't help. As soon as I do the update again the permissions dissappear.
The crazy thing is, I can plug in a Windows 98 workstation and everything works perfectly and I can update the program, but I still cannot run it on the Windows 2000 systems.
Does this sound like something others have seen?
Ed Form
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