Known bugs and work arounds in releases of Comwin with build date earlier than 12-June-2002. Articles with statistical period "Weekly" are not displayed properly in the Purchase Recommendations window. When trying to decide if there are 52 or 53 weeks in the year 2001, the program gets confused and thinks that week number 01 is the highest week number in the year 2001. It therefore refuses to display and information in 2001 after week 01. Work around 1: Do not use statistical period "Weekly" in 2001. Work around 2: Upgrade to Comwin version 3.21 or later. Sometimes when you resize a window the following error appears: The control or subform control is too large for this location.@The number you entered for the Left, Top, Height, or Width property is too large or is a negative number.@Reduce the size of the control or subform control, or enter a positive number.@1@@1 and the mouse is locked into the Comwin window and clicking anywhere has no effect. Work around: Press enter. Installing Comwin to a disk or directory other than the default C:\comwin causes a long period of inactivity (up to 4 minutes), and some menu options not to appear on the menu bar. Work around: Be patient, or go get a cup of coffee. After five minutes everything should be back to normal. It seems that MS-Access needs some time to reattach the program database to the file database when you change the location. The following bug is fixed in the current version, available for download from the Comwin site. It remains in this copy of the bug documentation to help customers who are still using older versions of the system. See the document describing changes between this, and the previous version for more details. The import and export options no longer work. In version 1 of Comwin it was possible to import and export all of the most important files from the file menu. In version 2 these functions were moved to a new Windows menu option which needed a different user identity to log on: DataManager. This user could import or export any file, as long as Microsoft Access was installed on the computer. In version 3.0 the DataManager functions stopped working and nobody noticed! Work around 1: Install MS Access and open the data database, Comwindb.mdb using Access. Log in as DataManager with the password exactly the same as the userid, i.e. capital D and M and all other letters in lower case. Ignore the error message saying that the initial menu does not work and use standard Access import and export functions. Work around 2: Be patient. The next release of Comwin will include import and export functions for the most important files again, in the standard run-time Comwin, under the File menu options. This change is our highest priority at the moment and will result in a release 3.2 of Comwin. A beta version should be available for download from Abrasive Software's site by the end of March 2000. GPF in Supplier invoices ready for payment when no records. If all supplier invoices are changed from status "Ready for payment" to "Paid", or, if you try to open this window when there are no invoices with status "Ready for payment", Windows says that Comwin has performed an "illegal operation" and Comwin dies. Work around: Enter a fictitious supplier invoice and never flag it as paid. Statistics files with a build date earlier than 17-Mar-2000 may contain invalid "null" values in some fields. These cause "conversion type" errors when trying to import them. Work around: Open the file with notepad and change all empty field values to zero. "Invalid use of null" error in Test response factors window. If the system is newly installed, and no article has ever been selected, the "Test response factors" windows tries to do something with a non-existent article number, the first time it is started. Other errors in Test response factors window. A number of new errors have appeared in this program in the latest version. They do not seem to be so severe that they force a restart of Comwin or Windows. Changing the input can get the program to work again without error messages. Unfortunately, we cannot reproduce these errors on demand. Whenever a programmer looks at the program to try to fix the problem, the program behaves itself and the programmer cannot fix a bug she cannot see. If you can figure out the exact sequence of actions, or combination of input, needed to make these errors occur consistently, please e-mail Marko@abrasive.se with the details and we will be extremely grateful. Newsflash! We have now discovered the cause of this problem. If the Comwin set-up program is made on a system where the decimal separator was not the same as that on the system to which it is loaded, the default values displayed for start, end and increment have the wrong separator (comma instead of point, or vice versa). This causes the program to crash. Work around: Click on the little arrows to select other values. The ones in the list have the correct separator. Trying the upgrade option when you have no data in the upgrade directory obliterates your data database. Work around 1: Think about how important it is to follow our advice about taking regular backups and consider a following some regular routine for doing so. Work around 2: Restore the latest backup of the Comwindb.mdb file. Work around 3: Re-install the latest copy, of the latest version, of the demo version, from the Comwin web site, and re-type all information you had in your previous version of Comwin, using any printouts you had the foresight to produce. When did you last re-consider your backup strategy? No build date The latest version of Comwin is supposed to include a little file called BuildDate.txt, so that you can easily check when the version of the programs you are using was created. It was forgotten during the build of all the latest versions. Clicking on the "Supplier orders" button, on the button bar at top of the Comwin window usually results in an error. Work around: Use the menu option instead, to start the supplier orders program. The window for maintaining User id's produces an error when trying to define a new id. Work around: Use only the shipped user id's until you can upgrade to a version in which this problem has been fixed. If you resize (height matters, not width) a form that contains a subform, e.g. forecast parameters, so that you see only part of the subform, close it and then reopen it, the vertical scroll bar is gone, and you will not be able to see the subform. Even changing the size of the form back does not help. Work around: Make the form high enough so that you should see the subform, close it, and reopen it again. The form in which the licence agreement is displayed shows only the beginning of the document. There is no scroll bar at the right, and the page down key does not work. Work around: Use your mouse to click anywhere in the text. This causes a scroll bar to appear, and, the mouse, arrow keys, and page up and down keys can be used to browse the full text of the agreement. "Function not available in expression ....." error message pops up in a number of Comwin windows on start up, rendering them unusable. This error has turned up in a number of computers, as soon as Comwin is installed, even though an identical version of Comwin in another computer seems to work perfectly! We thought we had fixed this bug with a change to Comwin 3.20. It then reappeared on a computer running an original version of Windows 98. Upgrading to Windows 98 Second Edition fixed the problem. Cause: Comwin makes use of certain windows, MS office, and visual basic components that can be used, or upgraded, by other windows programs. Microsoft has acknowledged that MS Access applications, like Comwin, made on a computer with one version of these components, can go crazy if installed on a computer with a different version. We were very pleased when, after spending a not insignificant amount of time, trying to figure out what we were doing wrong with Comwin, we discovered that Microsoft described this as a known problem with Access 97 applications. Work around 1..98: Install Comwin 3.20 (not a beta) or higher. If this does not work, upgrade Windows 98 to Windows 98 second edition, or to a later version of windows. Work around 99: Surf to the Microsoft knowledge base and find the article describing this bug. You can search on the error message text above. That is how I found it. You can then write a VB or Access program to check and re-register the changed windows components. Do not even think about trying this unless you are an expert windows programmer who understands the dangers of changing the windows registry. You can kill your computer! That is why this description is vague. If you understand it, then you might be competent to try it. Otherwise, see work around 1.