I'm working with VFP tech support on a difficult issue and I thought that I'd ask whether it sounded familiar to anyone here. The situation follows, as briefly as I can state it (not very, I know). If it sounds familiar, or if you have ideas for how to track it down, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks.

I've inherited a VFP6 app (apparently started in 5.0 and written by a guy who was pretty familiar with 2.x <s>) that uses Oracle for the back-end. Data access is performed in a mix of remote views (250) and SPT. Most of the remote views share a connection, but a few are asynch and make their own. The user who has the issue that I'm about to describe uses the application less than anyone else in our company. They only use 2-3 forms, all of which use parameterized views and/or SPT to ship transactional-sized (e.g., an invoice with a dozen line items) record sets back and forth. It's a C/S app. Not much OOP going on (yet), unfortunately, and definitely not nTier (yet).

The issue that occurs seems almost unrelated to the VFP app that I've described, EXCEPT that the issue only occurs AFTER the user has opened the VFP app at some point during the day. If he goes 3 days without running the VFP app, he goes 3 days without the issue. The day he opens it, he gets the issue, sometimes within 30 minutes, always within a half-day or so.

What happens is that the user's system resources (monitored by the utility that ships with Win98) drop from "normal" free levels of system, user, and GDI resources of 40,40,60 down to 20,20,40 or less. Again, this resource drop only occurs at some point after he has run the VFP application (but not necessarily when he's actually doing anything in the VFP app and often even after he has closed it - I know, I know, how could Fox cause that?). Other apps that he runs throughout the day are Outlook, Adobe Distiller, and WordPerfect 9. At times, he also runs Quattro 9 and Word 2000 too. Oh, and Norton Antivirus.

When the resources drop, the WordPerfect (or Word) documents that he works with all day suddenly lose fonts and/or processing codes (e.g., bold this, right align that) when he chooses to print them. He sometimes prints to an HP laser and other times prints a PDF via the Acrobat Distiller print driver. The amount of change to the document varies from merely dropping a bullet point (say one of 15) to total change of the document's font. Sometimes, it means going from Arial Narrow to Arial. Other times, it's all the way down to Times New Roman or Courier New (defaults in the templates). Sizes also change often. It could be anything, really.

The kinds of documents the guy works on is one-page resumes. He does a ton of work to adjust font sizes, line spacing, etc. to make the document fit on one page. The margins are very narrow (.25 at most). The main reason they use WP for these documents, BTW, is that it allows for decimal point sizes like 7.1, while Word must only allow .5 and .0 sizes. Once the resources drop and the problem occurs, it's reboot city. He reboots 6-12 times a day, depending on how much he has to use the VFP app.

There's actually more than one of these users who all experience the same issue. We upgraded one machine to Windows 2000 (WP9 would not allow us to do that until only recently) and the issue improved somewhat. The problem with that, though, is that the changes are now much more subtle. Our production department doesn't always catch the subtle changes, so we ended up sending out a stack or two resumes containing some percentage of copies that had subtle (but costly to us) issues (e.g., no space between characters on one line of the resume somewhere).

We are working around this, for now, by making them run the VFP app on a separate machine from the ones they use for word processing. This, of course, is a pain that they won't want to put up with forever.

On the off chance that someone is still reading <s>, I don't expect a quick solution, of course. I'm merely looking to see whether anyone else has experienced anything that sounds similar. It seems to me that it has to be some sort of bad interraction between VFP and one of the apps that he runs. I'd like to try one of the "RAM Recovery" products that people rave about on cNet and Winboost, but our network guy says he won't let us load one of those on in a million years. I plan to retire before then, so I need another solution.

Thanks,
Kelly