Andrus,

This is also a response to your other thread on the resource file. Hope you don't mind.

As I said yesterday, I've given your problems a lot of thought. I've come up with a list of things that might help. Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to go into details, but if you post a question here about one of the suggestions, and someone doesn't beat me to answering it, I'll try to help out.

It seems to me that there are actually two problems that you're experiencing. One is crashes after a power outage. The other is crashes cause by the program abending (C5).

Not knowing the resources you have available, I don't know if UPSs for all the workstations is an appropriate solution for the first one. Certainly, if the power supply is not reliable, over the long term, money will be saved by the reduction of duplicate keying, not to mention the amount of time you have to spend fixing things. This should more than off-set the cost rather quickly if this is the case.

This leaves the C5s. I know you've been trying to track down workarounds here to these. I don't know how many you've found either here or on your own. Nevertheless, here's what I'd do if I were in your situation.

1. During a normal shutdown, and hopefully, after the screen has been closed, I'd re-build all indexes from meta-data to assure that they weren't corrupt.

2. I'd make a copy of the resource file and its memo file.

3. On startup, I'd check for the presence of old temp files. In this regard, it would be a good idea to place these in a directory other than the Windows temp directory by using the TMPFILES= in the config.fpw file.

4. If old temp files exist, it would indicate that the program abended. In this instance I would prompt the user that the system was about to under go maintenance and to be patient while it was performed.

5. When doing the clean up mentioned above. I'd be sure to re-build the indexes from the meta-data. This can be tricky, however. I've seen instances where an index has been corrupted and the system won't open the table, and I've seen instances where it will open it. You should prepare for both cases.

6. I'd try to clean-up the resource file, and if that failed, copy from the last back up of it created.

I hope that these suggestions will help solve your problems. If I can be of any further assistance, please let me know.