Upgrade Access 97 -> 2003 Breaks Application

[James P. McNellis]

Hello.

I have just inherited a massive Access database. The owners used Access 97
until they just recently upgraded to Access 2003. After they upgraded,
certain functionality in the database stopped working.

I spent a good three hours searching for breaking changes made in Access
2003 but my search came up with no results. I attempted to search my way
through the source code to find the source of the errors, but as there are
over 550 pages of undocumented and poorly written source code, it is near
impossible to search through it.

Does anyone know of any breaking changes that might cause this or of any way
to run Access in a compatibility mode? I'm trying to hunt down a copy of
Access 97 right now, but am not having much luck.

I appreciate any suggestions, and as always, thanks in advance.

Cheers--

James McNellis
Center for Planning and Information Technology
The Catholic University of America

 

[Larry Kahm]

Not that this is the "be all and end all" of tools that you could use, but
it might help in your particular circumstance:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-ca/assistance/HA011401661033.aspx

Larry Kahm
Heliotropic Systems, Inc.

 

[Douglas J Steele]

More details might be useful. Do you get any error messages? If so, what are
they?

The first thing to try is to compile the application (on the Debug menu when
you're in the VB Editor).

A common reason why application suddenly stop working is a problem with the
References collection.

All Access databases contain references to external files that they use,
based on the version of that file that was present on the machine where the
application was created. If the same versions of the files don't exist in
the same locations on the two machines, you can run into problems. The
specific function(s) causing problems isn't indicative of which reference is
the culprit, either. References are like apples: one bad one can spoil the
whole bunch.

On the machine(s) where it isn't working, open any code module, then select
Tools | References from the menu bar. Examine all of the selected
references.

If any of the selected references have "MISSING:" in front of them, unselect
them, and back out of the dialog. If you really need the reference(s) you
just unselected (you can tell by doing a Compile All Modules), go back in
and reselect them.

If none have "MISSING:", select an additional reference at random, back out
of the dialog, then go back in and unselect the reference you just added. If
that doesn't solve the problem, try to unselect as many of the selected
references as you can (Access may not let you unselect them all), back out
of the dialog, then go back in and reselect the references you just
unselected. (NOTE: write down what the references are before you delete
them, because they'll be in a different order when you go back in)