Home Forums Discussions General Discussion MS ACCESS ISSUE

For some reason my MS ACCESS has decided not to stay installed. Every time I need a database, I seem to have to reinstall Access. This all started after some software for downloading holters was installed on my laptop.
Any ideas about what might be going wrong?
Thanks in advance

Vicki-

What exactly happens- is it that you can't boot up Access anymore? Do you get an error message?

Have you run an antivirus and a registry scanner? If not, I suggest these 3-

1) http://www.pandasecurity.com/activescan/index/ (one of several online scanners- does a very thorough job)
2) ACS (a jack of all trades program for antimalware, disk defrag, and registry optimization- FREE) http://download.cnet.com/Advanced-SystemCare-Free/3000-2086_4-10407614.html?tag=mncol
3) You can also scan your computer with Malwarebytes and Spybot S&D. AVG and Adaware are Ok, but the quality has decreased over the years.

Just the other day I had a malfunctioning program and the cause was that the computer had 2 HD- one for mirror backups. At one point suddenly the C: root drive became the backup drive with some root funtioning left pointing to the correct, now E: drive. It was a mess, and there is a trick to switch the root lettering back but it is a pain in the you-know-where. In that case I simply did a Windows XP repair install.

Al

There is also an installer issue with Access 2003 that is discussed here- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914830/en-us It was caused by the SP2 update and fixed eventually by the SP3 update.

Al

Hi Al,
My husaband was able to get the software folks from the holter company to help me completely uninstall the software and access worked fine. When we put it back on, same problem.

The issue with our Access 2007 was that every since installing the holter software, to use my database, Access had to completely reinstall every time. The icon for the database was yellow rather than the maroon, and wouldn't work. I had to go to Access, click on it, let it install and then open the database. We have moved the software to another laptop. The company is looking into this because they had never seen this problem before.

Thanks for the cleanup tools. Really helpful. We actually thoguht it might be a virus.

Hmmm... Didn't know about this particular incompatability problem with MS Access, but I have yet to move up to the 2007 version. I'm glad I stayed with 2000/2003! If you canvass through Google, though, you will find that the majority (actually, just about all) of these issues revolve around the following:

-- MDAC/ODBC issues (replacement with corrupted versions, and placement of these important dlls into the wrong folder- URL .
-- Also check out this site- URL

"These problems may have arisen because of an installation of older software that changed the registry settings of the ODBC drivers or replaced some .dll files with incompatible versions."

It all kind of makes sense- the holter, software based EKGs, software based PFTs all usually are based on old code. The dlls are very important to the proper functioning of MS Office. When I wrote the WordEMRProject years ago I put out 3 versions (for Word 2000/2002/2003), all of which required that I apply a software tool to load the proper dlls when the thing failed to work. MS Office is very particular about dlls and the more versions are out there, the more complicated the schemata becomes. If this is the issue, what you may need to do is to reload the MDAC back into your machine once both softwares have been installed. You can check for the current version as described here- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/301202 You should have at least version 2.8.

I may be totally off track here, but that is where I would start... By all means, keep us abreast to how this issue gets fixed!

Al

Very interesting Al. That makes sense out of the MS 2007 needing to reinstall every time. We'll be talking to their programmer again. Will let you know.

Hi Vicki-

If it is an MDAC issue, probably installing the holter first, then MS Office second should work, since by default you'd end up with the newest drivers. If it doesn't work, then it's a total incompatability issue, which could be solved with:

1) If the MDACs are different for both softwares, then backing down to MS Access 2000 or 2003 could resolve the issue. The old holter software database may not work with the newer MS Access 2007 drivers.
2) Try a dual boot arrangement on the same laptop.
3) Just buy one of the cheapo Dell Dual Core desktops/laptops that I've been buying on eBay and dedicate it to the holter (or to MS Access) and vice versa. Check out this laptop (10 being sold by this vendor):

1 Dual Core Dell Latitude Laptop CDRW>DVD WiFi XP-2 Duo
Intel Dual Core 3.2GHz,3GB RAM,250GB HDD,New Win XP CD!

Price: $450

Refurbished. Seller has almost 35500 sales and has 99.8% positive feedback. The last 2 laptops that I purchased on eBay cost only $105 (Dell D400, 2GB Ram, 1.6 GHz Single Core), and $152 (Dell C840 with 2GB Ram, 1.6 GHz Single Core CPU). This laptop mentioned above, though, is a dual core top of the line Dell, so it's a bit more, but not much.

If the incompatability is too difficult (or impossible) to resolve, don't spend too much time or effort on it. Time is worth $$$, and hardware is cheap nowadays!

Al