In hopes of preventing aggravation for others, here's documentation of
a strange problem and its solution.
I have an application on a network. One user was having trouble with
reports. IT guy and I worked together to investigate, because I know
Access reallyreally well, but I'm a Windows/network dummy.
Investigation showed:
-- We could view reports in design view, but attempts to preview
reports failed silently.
-- At one point while I was mucking around with VBA code I saw the
message "This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in
an unusual way". Looked that up, but didn't find anything helpful,
but we thought a reinstallation of Access might help. It didn't.
(True confessions: We did not get the chance to install service packs
before finding a resolution to the problem, so don't know how that
would have affected things.)
-- Attempting to manually create a new report failed silently.
-- Attempting to create a report using the wizard resulted in "The
Wizard is unable to create your report."
Aha -- something to look up! The error message was referenced in
Microsoft Knowledge Base article 208553, which referred to the problem
of no default printer.
Turns out we did have a default printer selected, but it was a network
printer that went through a print server outside of the building. This
occurred because the server itself was recently there and then it was
relocated to improve performance. So basically, it was a shared
printer, which worked absolutely fine, but was getting print requests
from another section of the company. So what we did (and by "we" I
mean "he") was delete that printer reference and make one that printed
directly to the IP address of the printer. Once we did that, it worked
like a charm.
Gotta love working with the IT guys who are willing to think through
things with you. Thanks, Eric!
