Rick Brandt said:
These are discussion groups. You make a post and a discussion follows.
If the discussion proves to be helpful to you that is fine, but you do not
get to dictate the direction, participants, or content of the discussion.
It might feel like "your thread", but that is not the case.
You know, somehow I was under the impression it was a support forum.
As for your OP, an incompatible version of jet will simply not be able to
work with an MDB file at all. Jet that is the same version, but at a
different patch level might produce some artifacts, but proper queries
returning no records (when they should) without raising error messages is
not anything that I have heard of.
Oh I am sure it does raise error messages. But these messages are not
displayed to the user.
The only thing I can relate that sounds even remotely similar is that I
have seen queries against ODBC sources that are used as ListBox or
ComboBox RowSources fail with an ODBC error that is silent. By that I
mean that the error message that ought to be displayed is not, and the
ListBox or ComboBox simply has a blank list as if the RowSource query had
no results.
Sounds like you're thinking I'm using this from within an Access
application. I'm not.
I have only seen that with ODBC sources and in the Runtime environment so
I doubt that your users are seeing the same thing.
I'm frankly quite shocked that with such a huge user base, this product does
not seem to have users at a very high level of experience answering this
type of question. For instance, in slogging through all the KB articles
that are returned when you type in "DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)"
in the search window, I've discovered many interesting facts, for instance:
1) The jet engine starts up on launch of Access itself, but starts in
other applications only when a connection is made (and presumably halts when
the connection is released). This implies that the Jet engine does not need
a service running to be able to connect, but there may be unknown factors
involved concerning how that process works in terms of permissions, etc.
2) The jet engine has memory leaks
3) Some versions of Jet have a path length limitation of 85 bytes, which
may be the issue in this case.
4) Sometimes, the Jet engine can be installed in a different language and
thus may not be called "Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)", so attempts to
connect to it under that name will fail.
5) TechNet has a whole bunch of utilities that enable you to look at what
the system is doing under the hood so that you can determine whether
surmises such as I made in (1) are correct.
How is it that you guys don't know _any_ of this, as experts (and you are
one recognized by Microsoft as one)? Most of these facts had nothing at all
to do with any error messages someone might see, so presumably you weren't
holding back for lack of error messages on those.
-Amy
