install Access 97 of Windows 2003 R2 Ent Ed

[Crums]

I am trying to install Access 97 on a Windows 2003 R2 Ent Edition
machine using 8 gigs of ram. Unfortunately, I have a legacy
application (which is no longer supported) that requires Access 97
(even Access 2000 won't work) to run and pull up legacy data. This
machine is also running SQL Server 2005, which is being used for a
newer applicaiton on this same machine and Office 2003 (without Access
2003 installed).

My situation is this. I have installed Access 97, found a system.mdb
file through a google search and placed it in the system32 folder to
get past one error. I am currently getting an "Out of Memory error"
which through all my searches looks like it can be resolved by
installing SR-2 for Office 97. Prior to installing Office 97 SR-2 I
have to install Office 97 SR-1, which is where I'm stuck. The Office
97 SR-1 install keeps telling me that "The patch has determined that
your installation of Office cannot be updated at this time. Shut down
all applications and rerun the patch...."

I have rebooted and killed all the SQL Server services, as well as
copying the extracted SR files from the Temp folder and tried running
the direct executible (the one setup calls). Same result. I have
also tried changing the compatibility mode on all the executables to
get past this error.

The main issue is to either install SR-2 on the machine to get past
the "Out of memory error". I have edited the MaxBufferSize in the
registry changing the DWORD to 2048 under the Jet Engine area as
another attempt to get past this.

Any assistance anyone can provide would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

I've heard that Windows 2003 has problems with Access.

Why, though, do you need Access to be installed on the server? As long as
each client has Access installed, there's no need for it to be on the server
(and if the clients don't have Access installed, putting Access on the
server won't buy them anything anyhow).

 

[Crums]

Thanks for your responce Doug.

Unfortunately, in this case the server is the client. The legacy
application is an OCR program that basically scans directories for
images and spits out Access 97 files directly on the server for each
directory (which it requires installed on the machine to do). The
department that would be using this server scans literally millions of
images (using 10 high speed scanners with automatic document feeders).
I would hate to have to move the images between machines in order to
OCR them (not to mention that it would bog down the network). And yes
I have tried the external harddrive approach. We have found that we
have so many images copying the files from the machine to a terabyte
dirve takes literally days. The other thing we tried to do was scan
directly to the external drive. This resulted in the server locking
up and crashing periodically during the copy (even using xcopy). Not
to mention that it is preferrable to have everything on RAID 5
directly on the machine so it is somewhat safeguarded against loss.

The resort I do nnot want to go to is to setup Virtual Machine and
install Windows 98 or something and run it on the virtual machine.
The main problem there is that I don't have drivers for Windows 98 for
the hardware and the personnel in the department are not very computer
literate. I imagine if I asked them to start a virtual machine they
would be totally lost (even with instructions).

I am currently trying Microsofts Application Verifier and
Compatability Tookkit, but do not know what setting to put in for the
compatability settings.

All this brings me to my current dilema. I really need to get Access
97 running on this machine. Please Somebody Help!!!!!


Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Jeff