At 2:32 pm -0500 13/10/01, Jacqueline Landman Gay wrote: >I have a system that works with about 50 forms for a school district. >One customer reports that all forms work fine except for one. When that >one is saved, it is deleted from the hard drive. It may be that the file >is moved instead, but at any rate, it is no longer visible within its >enclosing folder and appears to be gone. This happens on a Windows >machine but I don't yet know which version of Windows they are running. >The problem can't be reproduced on any other machine on either Windows >or Mac. > >I am wondering if anyone knows of any property settings in Windows that >would cause disappearance of a file after saving, since the customer did >have to change the "read only" setting manually due to an error in the >way the master files were originally shipped. They may have accidentally >changed some other setting as well. Or does anyone know of any other >reason why this file (and not the 49 others) might disappear?
I've come across something similar with the very original version of Win 95. Saving a Metacard file will sometimes cause the file to disappear. I haven't experienced it firsthand; only in some reports from a small number of users. I forget the details, but it involved the way Metacard saves files: renaming first as a backup, writing a new file, deleting the backup (or something like this). The OS indicates everything is OK, when in fact it isn't, so the backup is deleted and the data is lost. I found something on Microsoft's site once that seemed to acknowledge such a problem. I got round it by making a custom save routine. Fortunately, I've had no similar reports from any other Windows version. And as Microsoft disowned that version long ago, it's now hard to find any information. On a different file-related topic, I've recently had two reports of a strange "ghost file" being left after using Metacard's delete file command. It seems (again, I have no firsthand experience) that after deleting the file, it remains on disk but with zero bytes. (Unfortunately, this can mess with subsequent behavior of my application.) The reports are from a Win 98 and an NT 4.0 user. However, the command is working fine with hundreds of other machines using the same Windows versions. Has anyone seen anthing like this? Cheers Dave Cragg Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, not this list.
