Hi folks,
I've come across a couple of the oddest behaviors that I have ever seen and wondered if anyone else has had anything similar, and if so, whether you have any suggestions for me. I warn and apologize to any brave souls that the following description will be long -- it has to be -- but if you feel brave enough to read it, I will thank you.
Both of the phenomena seem to involve version dependencies. I had been using XP with Office 2003 and have recently upgraded to Win7, still with Access2003 for development. The access application in question has multiple users with different combinations of OS and Office versions. (And, frankly, is really pushing the limits for what an Access application should be expected to do.)
One of my main clients recently got a new computer with Win7. Last week she called and asked about why one field on a particular form (actually a continuous sub-form, which will be interesting later) was not showing. Naturally, it was fine for me, so I trotted on over to see what was going on. My first thought, of course, was that for some reason, the text color was the same as the background color in that text box, so my first test was going to be to select the text and see if that made a difference. To my surprise, as soon as I clicked in the text box, without actually selecting the text, the data became visible (black on light blue as it ought to be). I clicked in some of the other instances of the same field and they became visible too. After doing this to several, I scrolled back up and found that the text in the first couple had disappeared again.
I have tested this with several other users and found that 3 of the 4 with Win7 and Access 2007 show the same weird behavior, but 1 of those 4 gets normal behavior where all of the instances of that field are visible all the time as they should be. Everyone else I have checked, with XP/Access2003, XP/Access2007 and Win7/Access2003 are normal.
I have varied the fonts, font color, background color, screen resolution and "Custom text size (DPI)" (from the Win7 "Personalize" settings) with no differences. Somehow the one user for whom it works must have some different setting, but I have no idea what it could be. Does anyone here have any suggestions?
The other strange thing, which also happens only with the Win7/Access2007 combination also seems to occur only on a single (different) form in a single combobox where the combobox is populated in the usual way. The row source is a table (Delivery_Mode) with a key field and a text field. The control source is a field (CTM_Delivery_Mode) in the table that is the data source for the form and is intended to hold the id to the row source. When my user attempts to populate that field by picking an item in the combobox, she gets the dreaded error message "The Microsoft Access database engine cannot find a record in the table 'Delivery_Mode' with key matching field(s) 'CTM_Delivery_Mode'."
Again, this error occurs only in this one combobox (of all the different comboboxes populated this way) and only on the Win7/Access2007 combination. Other OS/Access version combinations all seem to act normally. Again, I have tested against XP/Access2003, XP/Access2007 and Win7/Access2003 from different workstations. The data for all of them resides in tables linked from SQL Server, not on the individuals' workstations, so I know that the data is not the problem. The configurations tested were using the same build of the Access application. I even relinked the relevant tables just to make sure, but if the links had been bad, I would not have expected to see the relevant data in the first place.
I would be grateful, even thrilled, for any suggestions.
Thanks,
Paul