Can't Run Windows 16-bit Program

  • Thread starter Thread starter Alex Balfour
  • Start date Start date
A

Alex Balfour

For some years now I've been developing a widely used piece of freeware
called Calendar Magic using VB3. My development system is Windows XP
Home Edition based.

Recently two users have reported problems when trying to run Calendar
Magic on XP Pro based systems. In both cases, the above error message
comes up plus "Cannot find file C:\PROGRA~1\Calendar Magic\calendar.exe
(or one of its components)". We've tried the obvious things but without
success.

Has anyone got any ideas or suggestions? For example, could the problem
be security or privilege related?

Alex Balfour
 
The clue is in your error message itself.

If you notice Program Files is truncated back to it's 8.3 name
(Progra~1), while the destination folder is a LongFileName with
spaces. For the shortcut to work properly, The "Calendar Magic"
would also need to be defined in 8.3 syntax. (Calend~1).
 
The actual shortcut is defined OK (as far as I know) but this is how the
error message is reported by XP Pro.

Also if you double-click directly on the exe file, the same error
message occurs.

Alex Balfour
 
Some good news. As a result of your email, I asked the two users having
problems to try installing Calendar Magic to a folder whose name
contained 8 or fewer characters, e.g. c:\calmag.

The error message disappeared. However, I am still puzzled as to why the
particular problem occurred on two systems out of many thousands. Any
thoughts?

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction.

Alex Balfour
 
Back
Top