Unstable Access

[PhilOfWalton]

I have developed (with lots of help) a Rich Text message box. Advantages being, apart from being pretty, you can copy the any error message wording.

Basically, there are 2 ways of using it. You type and format a rich text message in the top box, press the Test Output Button, and the code in the bottom box can be pasted into a VBA project to replace MsgBox

Alternatively, if yo have the VBA code, that can be pasted into the bottom box, Press the Restore button and the Rich Text gets restored.
I won't go into all the details, unless someone comes up with something

I just have a feeling it is unstable, as when I close programs that use the 2 forms and 1 module.

I often get an error message to the effect that Access is restarting.

If anyone could look at it and give any advice, I'd be very grateful.

[zmbd]

I haven't downloaded this yet... are you making any API calls?
Did the code work in 32Bit OS?

[PhilOfWalton]

I am using Windows 10 64 bit & Access 2010 32 bit for all applications.

The RichBox uses lots of API calls, interestingly some of them use the Office 64 bit version with the word PtrSafe in it, but I have never found that a problem in other databases.

Phil

Phil

[jforbes]

Phil,

I played around with this. More than I intended to and I noticed the instability that you are talking about as well as the Copy and Paste crash while debugging. It seemed most of the time the errors would happen when something during debugging caused This action will reset your project, proceed anyway? When that message popped up, it was a guarantee Access was going to crash soon.

I also /decompiled the database, but it didn't change anything. I didn't create a new database and reimport everything, which should probably be tried.

Which makes me think something within the API calls is being orphaned, a pointer or type structure isn't being disposed of properly. So when the "Reset... proceed anyway?" message is displayed, you just know Access isn't going to be able to clean up like it thinks it can.

Another thing that I noticed is that I could mess around all day and not experience the error, but sometime after displaying the RichTextBox things would get unstable. Again, this reinforces to me that one of the APIs isn't cleaning up after itself, since that is where the bulk of them are being used.

I would recommend commenting out blocks of API calls at a time to see if you can get things to stabilize. Alternatively, you could comment them all out and see if the problem goes away.

For your info, I monkeyed around with the database on a Windows 7 machine, and Access 2007.

[PhilOfWalton]

Thanks, jforbse, I really appreciate the time that you have spent. If we can overcome the problem, I think it could be quite useful bit of software.

I use it in some of my programs, and fortunately, in normal use as an AccDb or AccDe the error only shows up after closing the database.

Anyway, you certainly have given me some good news. If it crashes on both your machine and my Widow 10 with Access 2010 32 bit, there has to be something wrong and I agree, it's almost certainly due to an API not releasing something.

I shall play around tomorrow and keep you informed.

Phil