Unknown characters showing on form?

[Steve in MN]

I have a database deployed on 22 different servers thru out our company for
different remote locations around the country. It is basically the same
program for all of the centers using Office XP pro with Windows Xp operating
system.
The program runs fine on 21 of the servers, but on this last one it is
acting weird. They have wierd things showing up on their screen and error
messages that when i move the program back to my PC it runs fine.
I dont have remote access to actually see what the display problems are, but
i have been told that a simple text field is displaying what looks like a
formula rather than a number. And there is a comments box which is a memo
field and they say it is displaying like "wing ding" characters (font).
They say they have tried this on more than one of their PC's with the same
results.
I know this isn't a very good explanation, but like I said the program is
solid and when moved to another server or to the C drive of my PC it works
and displays as it was designed.
What would cause an access form to display random garble in only select
fields?

Any insight as to where to start to make changes would be appreciated.

Mind you i am not an IT systems guy, just a database designer so anyone that
might have an idea what might be affecting this from a server stand point let
me know as well.

Steve

 

[Allen Browne]

There must be something different about the machine(s) where it behaves
differently.

First thing for them to check would be that they have applied the latest
service pack for there version of Office *and* for the JET database engine.
They can get both from this link:
http://support.microsoft.com/sp
(The JET SP is under the Developer Tools heading.)

Once that's done, if the problem persisits, it might be one of the issues
referred to in these links:
http://allenbrowne.com/bug-18.html
http://allenbrowne.com/bug-16.html
http://allenbrowne.com/ser-63.html

It's also possible that they have a corruption. Have them run the recovery
steps suggested here:
http://allenbrowne.com/recover.html
(Note that they need to recover the back end database if the tables are
attached.)

But the odd thing is that it occurs on only some machines, so if none of
that helps, your next step is to identify what's different about those
machines, e.g. version of Access, permissions, library references, ...

 

[Chegu Tom]

I have had a similar problem. The text box used a font that was not
available on another machine which used a wing ding type font.

Try defining the font for that form/control to a very common standard font
(Arial, times New Roman, etc)

 

[Steve in MN]

Thanks for the responses.

I have been out on Vacation since i posted this. I have requested them to
get me some screen shots of the system info so i can see what version of Jet
they are are running and what service pack and version of office they have
also.

I did look at some of the bugs you linked to but those dont seem to apply to
my situation. The form is only a straight select query and is not grouped by
or concecated on the memo field. The font on all of the fields on the form
is Tahoma which i think is some what standard?

The problem is on all of the computers on this particular server, so i'm
leaning toward the version issue. However I do have the auto correct
running, which according to the one link can cause issues. I will change
that tomorrow when i find out what they are running over there and post back.

Steve

 

[Steve in MN]

When we ran their system info and looked under the Access 2002 grouping and
went into summary. They showed nothing for a Jet installation and their ADO
version said Not Available. Going to have them do a re-install and see if
that helps.