Gail Duro wrote: > I contacted Guy to get more background on the problem. Once I determine > the cause I will post the information to the list. Not more than five minutes after Gail's call, the PICS engineer called with the problem ID. The solution shows that HP is making MPE more reliable, though it creates some short term compatability problems. To open I'll note that the problem was in our code, and was a "flat forehead" error. You know the type. The moment you discover the error you drive your forehead into the nearest hard surface in hopes of beating some sense into yourself. Some days I believe my job is to make these impressions on others. Anyway, AIFSysWideGet receives a search_key parm, which as documented is a variant record or union, depending on the language. In 4.0, 4.5 and 5.0 PULL, this record was more-or-less ignored during the initial call to AIFSysWideGet. Now it is not. The values are checked and if the variable is not properly initialized, the routine returns an error. Two programmers built our utility that went south with 5.0 PUSH. One created the core software, and the other embellished. The original programmer created the variant/union and the other created the routine with initalized it. The problem was that the second programmer treated it as a record/structure and not a variant/union. His subroutine initalized each member of the variant/union. Each initialization simply overwrote the previous one. The last element was a pointer, which was set to NIL. Now that AIFSysWideGet was checking this parmameter, it saw the binary zeros and rejected the call. BTW, we had the second programmer hauled out back and shot. What is encouraging, despite these minor self-induced annoyances, is that HP was making the routine more reliable. We saw the same with a change made to CreateProcess and an undocumented itemnum(13). In the long run, this will make MPE more bullet proff and a better buy, so I'm willing to work through these little disruptions. ======================================================================= Guy Smith Voice: 804-527-4000 ext 6664 Circuit City Stores, Inc. FAX: 804-527-4008 9950 Mayland Drive E-Mail: [log in to unmask] Richmond, VA 23233-1464 Private E-Mail: [log in to unmask] The thoughts expressed herein are mine and do not reflect those of my employer, or anyone with common sense.