I once knew a fellow who took off all his clothes then jumped into a cactus patch. Later I asked him why he did it. He said, "Seemed like a good idea at the time". -- Steve McQueen in the "Magnificent Seven"

Right now I feel like like I should be pulling cactus spines out of my flesh. I'm guilty of giving some of you some very bad advice as it turns out. So the purpose of this post is to apologize and make sure that what happened to me, doesn't happen to you.

I've responded to a number of various posts with answers involving the Common Dialogs ActiveX control. In the course of those, I mentioned that I sub-class them using the syntax

oDlg = CREATEOBJECT('MSComDlg.CommonDialog.1')

In a few words, DON'T DO THIS (pardon me for shouting this, but it was needed).

Oh, it works fine under VFP, and I'd been making adjustments to existing applications. Last Friday, I did the first update to an application in production. That's when the problem starts. All of a sudden, a user couldn't get the control ShowOpen method to work. She was getting the infamous 0x80040112 error (Appropriate license for this class not found). Well, I knew good and well that it was in the registry, and using RegEdit confirmed this.

So for the past two days, I've been regenerating the installation program, re-installing, testing, ad naseum. Finally, I had the good sense to look in the MS Knowledge Base, where I found article Q192693. This documents this problems and says that it is, indeed, a bug.

So, to any of you who has taken my advice and is using CREATEOBJECT() in this manner, please stop and accept my apologies. Below is the URL which will show you the workaround.

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q192/6/93.ASP

Sorry guys,