1) Lock up - the machines completely freeze up. CTRL+ALT+DEL does not work. Reset or recycle power only.
2) Two of the machines - enter the program, open one form, close it, exit. Enter the program, open one form, freezes. Recycle power only way to get system back up. Windows itself completely freezes up.
3) Two of the machines - same location in a peer to peer, are about 300 miles from me. User is somewhat literate but not a hardware or software guru. I guess I will have to make the most of it and try to talk him through hardware tests.
4) Anti-virus is running - I had him try it without the software running. Failed.
5) Had him restart - fire up windows w/o the network. Same failure.
6) Latest Video drivers installed.
7) Windows 75 sp1 applied.
8) Dcom updated.

I am real interested how others would go about this. Do we take a trip and work on site? Do we attempt to walk them through? In May, I could have him bring one of the machines to me during our convention. Should I get MS involved with my last tech support call? I guess no matter what - it is not going to be easy...

Robert




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>You're going to get lots of guesses, any one (or more) of which may be right. I think a better approach is to clarify exactly what you mean by 'lock up', and from the symptoms, see if we can find common elements of the two machines that fail that are different on others that don't.
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>Let's clarify 'lock up'. What does the program do - does it load at all, does it run for a while and freeze, does it fail to respond after some specific sequence of actions, or some period of time. I'd like to nail down the concept of the error with greater precision than President Clinton used to define what he and Monica did as not being sexual relations...
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>Next, look for some common components of the system that lock up. Start with hardware - processor, motherboard revision, video card, memory. Once you found some things that look common to both, see if you can find other systems that have the same configuration items and don't lock up.
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>Next, software. this is the most tedious of tasks, and the one most likely to be the root of your problem. Examine the entire environment - you need to examine the operating system, including patches applied, drivers and driver revisions, network configuration and the like. Then start looking at components like software found on the systems that lock up but not on the others. This requires that you examine exact versions of software; it could be as simple as a common patch to a package not otherwise suspect (I saw this recently when a few things broke when applying the initial SR2 for Office, not caused by the SR2a patch. Outwardly, both SR2 versions identified themselves as the same revision level; we had to examine common components version and sizes to find out exactly what needed to be changes to make a station with Sr2 on it behave like it had SR2a, since the SR2a install didn't run if SR2 was already in place. This is a long and boring story...)
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>You've checked for virii already, I presume.
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>If nothing seems to come out of detailed analysis, try to simplify and standardize the systems' configuration. Turn of APM. Under Win98, try using MSCONFIG to adjust what drivers are loaded, and to block sections of the registry, SYSTEM.INI, WIN.INI, AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS temporarily. MSCONFIG is a wonderful troubleshooting tool where base driver loading and configuration issues may be the root of a problem.
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>You've already run extensive diagnostics to make sure the hardware is OK, right?
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>If other, similar systems are working, you might want to take a look at items in the CMOS setup. A little injudicious tweaking of memory timing, disk modes and the like might be causing your problems.
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>Do the basic homework, clarify the exact symptoms and conditions of contest, and we stand a better chance of guessing the cause of your problems...