>Why does the app not run under Win7 and why do you think the problem will be
>resolved by "upgarding" to VFP9.
>
>I have VFP6 apps that run fine under Win7

Sorry for my earlier outburst. Sytze is, of course, correct.

The most common reasons why an app created when VFP 6 was current won't run 
under Win 7 would be:

1. The app writes data to its own "home" folder under C:\Program Files, and 
then expects to be able to read that data.

MS, in its infinite wisdom, thinks it's a bad idea to let software write 
data within C:\Program Files because it "might be a virus". It didn't occur 
to them that malware authors can understand these rules as well as anybody 
else and can write data to other locations--and cause executables to be run 
from those other locations.

In any case, in this situation, Win 7 (and, I believe, Win Vista) will 
"virtualize" the written data to a location inside the user's profile--that 
is, they intercept any "write" commands and cause them to be executed 
elsewhere. That works great--no error messages occur--but the app doesn't 
know this was done and these latest and greatest operating systems are too 
stupid to intercept any "read" commands and redirect them to the actual 
location where the data was written to. At that point, many errors ensue.

You can turn this off, in Vista and Windows 7, via editing one or more 
security policies. Stephen, no doubt, will jump in and say this is stupid 
and unsafe. To which I respond, the malware authors are already miles ahead 
of this and have long ago re-written their apps to bypass this trivia.

So you can either rewrite your app so it uses the proper Windows %whatever% 
locations, or tell users to install your app in the root directory (ie. 
C:\My App) or you can tell users how to turn this useless feature off.

2. There could, I think, possibly be some graphical issues in Win 7 with 
the full-on "Aero" graphics system running. There were issues in VFP 9 with 
this that had to be fixed; I'm not clear on whether they exist with VFP 6. 
But users could be asked to use one of the older themes to see if that 
clears up the problem. People running business apps shouldn't be expecting 
things to be all pretty anyway...

3, Your installation doesn't deposit all of the required dependencies into 
the folder where the application resides, and users are trying to run your 
application as restricted users. Change your installation app to put all 
the dependent files into the application folder (instead of into "\system" 
or "\sytem32\").

4. There are issues with both medium-old-style "Windows Help" and CHM help 
files in Windows 7; your installation app may need to deal with this.

5. The OS may be a 64 bit version; in this case, some things get installed 
in the wrong locations. This can be Googled.

Ken Dibble
www.stic-cil.org



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