We have a client with a stand alone PC running Windows ME. We've installed Arev 3.12 and after much fiddling we have EMS available.

We can now get into the application but when we exit out, we get a black screen and the only way it is to press "Reset"

Is it that ME is just a load of …….

or is there somebody who has experienced this problem and as such has some suggestions.

TIA

Claude

Claude ..

I sympathize with you. Personally, I think ME is NFG, but that's another story. An example .. Gateway had Microsoft do a one-off version of ME which bundled some of Office's stuff in. Microsoft, in its wisdom, modified CTL3D.DLL (one of the oldest Windows DLL's, BTW) in such a way as to prevent a user from installing Corel's products (WordPerfect, etc.). A by-product of this is that our OI app stopped functioning properly. The work around was to check the version of the operating system on the desktop in the start-up. If it was .. I forget which one right now .. we loaded a local copy of CTL3D.DLL. This solved the problem but took a huge amount of work to find it. Other problems with ME include the inability to load EMS or to properly locate the EMS Page Frame so it doesn't conflict with other things, unexplained lock-ups during background indexing in AREV (not due to screen saver or suspend in background either). ME seems to be a little more hardware sensitive than 98-SE or NT. Win2K and XP are a whole other can of worms (mostly driver compatibilities, etc.). Once things get sorted out, them seem pretty stable.

Essentially, you're in fiddle time .. maybe you can get paid for it, maybe you can't (in my experience). .

Don

Claude,

Are you running ARev in full-screen mode? The only thing I can think of is if you don't have "Close on exit" checked in the PIF, but you've probably already thought of that.

[email protected]

Greyhound Lines, Inc.

On the "Is ME a load of ?" we had a different but strange case on an OI system (for what it's worth).

User system fine until the boss logged on, then other PCs (except his) froze at random - until he logged off. One UK Revelation guru told me that ME is a load of trouble but another said it is fine. However, they gave hthe boss's PC to someone for WP and got him another without ME - and they've been happy ever after.

Gday Claude,

Yeah I get weird screen behaviour in ME. I find there is trouble sooner or later if I use full screen mode.

I thought it was a laptop idiosyncracy. Maybe Ive been blaming the laptop for the sins of King William of Gates.

I think everyone has missed the boat on this one. ME was really designed for more home/emtertainment use than office use. Also, and this is big, the DOS environment is not a true environment and therefore does not like DOS applications. It just was not designed to be compatible with any DOS programs, this is why there are problems. Dont bash ME, its easier to just not use DOS applications on it.

Thanks for all the comments.

As a rule we don't support Arev on ME due to previous bad experiences with it (I posted Table copy problems some time back). But as we have a notebook which has been happily running Arev for the last 6 months on ME, I thought there may have been Service Releases to fix DOS application problems. Obviously not.

I will check on Full Screen mode (as we don't use it on our notebook either) and as a last resort I'll compare the DLL. Unfortunately it was a long distance installation so if I can't get it to work, I'll tell them to upgrade to Win'98!!

Thanks to you all.

I agree with whatever said in this topic.

I had AREV instaled on notebook with ME

without a problem, but I am not able to configure EMS

on desktop.

Thank you for opening this topic, I will probably stop trying

to configure the desktop under ME.

(or maybe … can Don give a hint how to properly locate the EMS

Page Frame so it doesn't conflict with other things?)

Well .. that begs the question doesn't it. When machines ship with pre-loaded software (ME or whatever) and removing it will void the manufacturer's warranty (as in the case of Gateway's ME release, at least), what's a customer to do? The problem is that given that ME doesn't like DOS apps, and I have a fair number of sites that are still running the DOS version of our core product, whose responsibility is it to make sure that they can still work? I would wager that 50% our costs of tech support have nothing to do with our software, per-se, but are generally related to infrastructure issues .. operating systems, desktop shells, service pack incompatibilities, NLM / Win2K service, etc. No matter how much we don't like it, and say we won't support it, many of my customers don't bother to check before ordering .. and then we're sometimes stuck. Well .. that's enough of this bitch session!

Don Miller

C3 Inc.

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