Access VBA crashes silently

[Cruachan]

I have an Access database running on Windows XP which seems to have a
corrupted VBA environment, but I can't seem to get a handle on what's
gone wrong. Any pointers would be appreciated.

The system has Office XP (2002) with Office SP3 installed running on a
new installation of XP with SP2 applied.

Everything initially ran fine, but after the my client had been running
the application for few days it started crashing with 'Access has
encountered an error and has to close' but no further details.
Stepping through the code revealed that the system could crash at a
couple of points (there are probably others) -

CreateObject("ADODB.application")

and

Kill <some filename>

In both cases the debugger would step into the line of code and then
stop. Interesting in the debugger the system didn't produce an error,
just silently stop running. This was not a hang - the system is
still
responsive - it just drops out of running any code at that point.

To confirm I created a small sample database with one form and a button
linked to the lines of code

MsgBox "Before Kill"
Kill "c:\test.txt"
MsgBox "After Kill"

This time the database ran both in and outside the debugger, but never
displayed the second message in either case - i.e. it is silently
crashing at the kill statement (the file is not removed). I can run
the database across the network on another machine and it all works
fine, so it isn't Access itself which is corrupted.

A comparison of the VBA references reveals no differences from a
similar machine where the system is still working.

The only changes that have happened between the application being
installed, when it worked correctly, and now is that a number of MS
hotfixes have been applied by MS Update, and the client has installed
another small application put together by someone in-house. This other
application appears to have been written in VB6, and the suspicion is
that this installation (using a VB6 created install we believe) has
corrupted the VBA environment. However removing the other application
and reinstalling our application does not have any effect. Indeed
we've gone so far as to unregister all dlls in the other applications
setup.lst file (except the ole dll) and ensure that all it's copies of
any files it installed have been removed.

Interesting there are another couple of boxes which are running our
application where the VB6 application was installed first, and these
appear to work fine. Also our application didn't stop working until a
day or two after the VB6 application was installed, but that may be
because no reboot was applied before then.

I've searched usenet and MS for an answer, but without an error message
it's difficult to find anything. Any help would be much appreciated.

Kevin

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

Don't know whether it's a cause of the problem, but there is no
ADODB.Application object.

Does the file to be deleted exist? Try:

If Len(Dir("c:\test.txt"))>0 Then
Kill "c:\test.txt"
End If

 

[Cruachan]

Sorry, I'm writing this away from the box with the problem.

In fact any call to CreateObject fails (for example the call to open
Word from the button wizard) and Kill fails even if the file exists.

I havn't tried anything else, but the common theme looks to me like
interaction out with the windows OS.