Paul,

I'm sure you know this, but just in case it has slipped your mind...

Older PCs - and not really "old" by normal business standards - basically have motherboards that support only a limited amount of RAM, some even under 1 GB.

Is it possible that that is the real cause of this issue?... RAM is very cheap today and generally will still fit into older PCs, but that doesn't mean that it will work correctly.

good luck


>Agnes,
>
>This is a problem not just on one PC, but reported by several clients. It is random in nature and started about 6 months ago - presumably when more clients got PC's with > 1GB RAM. They can run the invoice (a very complicated fees program - not routine stuff) with the error and then reverse and redo the same thing exactly and not get the error. I used clients data side by side and NEVER happens on my PC's - none of my PCs are over 1 GB.
>
>>Paul,
>>
>>hm, I run all my PC's with 2GB VFP9 SP1, Customers too. I never run into such problems.
>>Surely it has to do with the VFP9 deals with the memory, but it could be outside VFP.
>>
>>Have you run a Memorytest / hardwaretest against the machine? Could you reproduce on other machines?
>>
>>My experience is, that errors like this result from bad hardware. Cruel things may happen with a bad capacitor.
>>
>>Agnes
>>>Recently I posted a problem with random calculation and printing bug in VFP8/9 with one of my inventory apps. It would give strange results about every tenth time for some customers. But never happened on any of my PCs.
>>>
>>>OK. I think I have resolved the problem. It has to do with VFP8/9 memory handling. One of my customers has two PC's: one with 384KB RAM memory (no problem) and the other with 1.25GB (YES random problems). The app has quite a bit of memory variables, public and private, and quite a bit of string handling and various complicated functions. Note that I never had any problems on my PC's - but none of my PCs have RAM over 1GB. It seems that VFP8/9 does not manage memory properly with PCs over 1GB. The same previous version of the app used VFP5 with no problems - could it was in the < 1GB memory era.
>>>
>>>Here is the way I resolved it. I put the following code at beginning of my program:
>>>
>>>SYS(3050, 1, Min(536870912,VAL(SYS(3050, 1, 0))))
>>>SYS(3050, 2, Min(536870912,VAL(SYS(3050, 1, 0))))
>>>
>>>That limits VFP buffer memory to lesser of available and 1/2 GB.
>>>
>>>My one 1GB PC had no problems and its VFP had about 0.75 available memory, so I put it at 1/2 GB max to be safe.