WARNING: Do not use Vista for multiple versions of Access!

[Tim Marshall]

I have yet to get even Access XP and Access 2003 to live in harmony on
the same XP machine

Dumb question, but is there such a thing as Access XP? I thought that
was an incorrect term for Access 2003?

 

[Allen Browne]

No. The installer is still invoked for some versions, Bruce.
And it's long enough to make a coffee when you switch to A2007.

 

[Rick Brandt]

Dumb question, but is there such a thing as Access XP? I thought that
was an incorrect term for Access 2003?

It's actually an incorrect term for Access 2002. That came as part of Office XP
and most people don't realize that the "XP" only refers to the suite and not any
of the programs themselves.

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

Dumb question, but is there such a thing as Access XP? I thought that was
an incorrect term for Access 2003?

No, it was an incorrect term for Access 2002. (Understandable incorrect
term, though, since it's part of Office XP.)

 

['69 Camaro]

Hi, Tim.

Dumb question, but is there such a thing as Access XP? I thought that was an
incorrect term for Access 2003?

It's not a dumb question. Access XP is occasionally referred to when describing
Access 2002, due to it being a member of the Office XP suite of products. The
proper name is Access 2002, though. There is no Access XP. (And that hasn't
stopped me from calling it that on occasion!)

HTH.
Gunny

See http://www.QBuilt.com for all your database needs.
See http://www.Access.QBuilt.com for Microsoft Access tips and tutorials.
http://www.Access.QBuilt.com/html/expert_contributors2.html for contact info.

 

[Lyle Fairfield]

If you develop for others, you probably have multiple versions of
Access installed so you can edit and create MDEs for clients in
different versions. This works fine under Windows XP, even with Access
2007 installed.

It does *not* work under Windows Vista Ultimate. After running Access
2007, when you open an earlier version of Access, no code works,
because the references are fouled up. And Access 97 does not work at
all.

Access should adapt the Access library according to the version of
Access you are using. Under Vista, this doesn't happen, so Access
2003, 2002, or 2000 attempt to use the Microsoft Access 12.0 library.
Naturally enough, that fails. You cannot just uncheck the bad library
and choose the correct one, since it is a required library.

You can "repair" your Access install, which works until you run Access
2007 again. Office already does a lengthy reinstallation whenever you
switch versions, so this is not a practical solution.

I've experienced this on Vista Ultimate, and the same was true of the
user who raised this in microsoft.public.access.formscoding. In cannot
say if it applies to other versions of Vista, but since the problem
appears be be the interaction between Office and the Vista registry, I
don't see a reason why it would be limited to Ultimate.

If there does turn out to be a simple solution for this, hopefully we
will hear soon. In the mean time, stay with Win XP if you use multiple
versions of Access.

When I was actually working at this I kept separate machines for each
version for which I was developing.
I suppose today we could safely drop Access 2000 and anything previous
and use three machines which could cover 2002, 2003 and 2007, and Windows
XP and Vista. Assuming they are networked it would not be difficult to
import objects up, and using SaveAsText/LoadFromText (and perhaps a
little editing) one might be able to inport them down as well.
Developing in Access is not very demanding of machine. A couple of them
could be $500 jobbies.
I hate this reinstall thingme that happens when we try to use different
versions on the same machine, especially when it wants the CDs; I guess
MS doesn't realize that in some people's minds it's an enormous blackeye
for them, or doesn't care.

 

['69 Camaro]

Hi, Lyle.

I hate this reinstall thingme that happens when we try to use different
versions on the same machine, especially when it wants the CDs; I guess
MS doesn't realize that in some people's minds it's an enormous blackeye
for them, or doesn't care.

Come to think of it, Microsoft has documented that they don't recommend running
multiple versions of Office on the same computer, yet we've known for years that
with the right tweaking, they can peacefully co-exist, so we do it anyway.
Perhaps this is their way of saying, "WE MEAN IT!!!"

It's enough to make me back off.

HTH.
Gunny

See http://www.QBuilt.com for all your database needs.
See http://www.Access.QBuilt.com for Microsoft Access tips and tutorials.
http://www.Access.QBuilt.com/html/expert_contributors2.html for contact info.

 

[Allen Browne]

Thank you to everyone who responded to this thread.

Have attempted to incorporate the various workarounds in this article:
Errors using multiple versions of Access under Vista
at:
http://allenbrowne.com/bug-17.html
with the advantages and limitations of each option.

 

[Lynn Trapp]

Come to think of it, Microsoft has documented that they don't recommend

running multiple versions of Office on the same computer, yet we've known
for years that with the right tweaking, they can peacefully co-exist, so
we do it anyway. Perhaps this is their way of saying, "WE MEAN IT!!!"

Hi Gunny,

Maybe so, but they just can't do that to developers who NEED to have
multiple versions running on the same machine in order to do conversions.
This is an issue that they really need to fix and not just tell us to stuff
it....LOL.

 

['69 Camaro]

Hi, Lynn.

Maybe so, but they just can't do that to developers who NEED to have multiple
versions running on the same machine

I'm confident Access developers will eventually find a way to do this that is
invisible or nearly so, because we just won't put up with this for long.

Gunny

See http://www.QBuilt.com for all your database needs.
See http://www.Access.QBuilt.com for Microsoft Access tips and tutorials.
http://www.Access.QBuilt.com/html/expert_contributors2.html for contact info.

 

[David W. Fenton]

Have attempted to incorporate the various workarounds in this
article:
Errors using multiple versions of Access under Vista
at:
http://allenbrowne.com/bug-17.html
with the advantages and limitations of each option.

Well, I must say I misunderstood something. I thought you could
permanently define a shortcut to run as administrator (without
writing code to invoke the RunAs service). That would be a really
stupid design on MS's part.

 

[David W. Fenton]

Well, I must say I misunderstood something. I thought you could
permanently define a shortcut to run as administrator (without
writing code to invoke the RunAs service). That would be a really
stupid design on MS's part.

It seems from what I've read that you can change the an executable
to run with admin privileges, as opposed to a shortcut. Can someone
investigate and see if you could change each of your non-A2K7
MSACCESS.EXE files to always run with admin privileges by right
clicking them and changing the appropriate properties?

 

[David W. Fenton]

It seems from what I've read that you can change the an executable
to run with admin privileges, as opposed to a shortcut. Can
someone investigate and see if you could change each of your
non-A2K7 MSACCESS.EXE files to always run with admin privileges by
right clicking them and changing the appropriate properties?

Also, there's apparently group policies that goven how UAC works.
Could someone look at those and see if they can be altered partially
to make this problem go away? It may be that the individual policies
don't control this, and the only way is to turn it off entirely, but
it's worth a look.

(sorry to be asking others to do this, but I'm very concerned about
this for the future, about a year from now when my first clients get
Vista, and I don't have any way to test it myself -- no hardware to
run it on)

 

[David W. Fenton]

Also, there's apparently group policies that goven how UAC works.
Could someone look at those and see if they can be altered
partially to make this problem go away? It may be that the
individual policies don't control this, and the only way is to
turn it off entirely, but it's worth a look.

(sorry to be asking others to do this, but I'm very concerned
about this for the future, about a year from now when my first
clients get Vista, and I don't have any way to test it myself --
no hardware to run it on)

Sorry to draw this out -- I'm reading and discovering things as I
go.

In the microsoft.public.windows.vista.security group, there are a
number of posts on UAC. Here are some message IDs that might provide
suggestions for resolving this issue:

<[email protected]>

The followups to that post are pretty illuminating, especially:

<[email protected]>

Another article pointed me to this:

http://windowsconnected.com/blogs/jerry/archive/2005/12/21/97.aspx

which describes how to create a "run-time manifest" that allows you
to override default security settings. I don't know how the details
work, but maybe someone could look at it and try to figure it out.

The thread starting with this post:

<[email protected]>

is a good walk-through of the way UAC works and why it's important.

I'd be interested if anyone can look through some of those resources
and see if it's possible to figure out a reasonable workaround for
the coexistence problem short of turning off UAC.