BUGS Being Experienced with Windows 7 64-Bit

[brucet]

Is actinic not worried about us all having this error on closing actinic?

Worried is the wrong word. On the one hand, the more people who report this issue without identifying any harmful side effects, the more likely it is that there aren't any - which concurs with our own investigations so far.

On the other hand, we also don't want it lingering around undermining confidence in the software. In fact we absolutely want to identify and fix all the issues reported here, as soon as possible and to the satisfaction of everyone involved.

To that end we are setting up a completely new test environment to investigate all these issues, on a brand new PC (which frustratingly hasn't turned up yet, hence the delay...). Lee has also agreed that we can dial in to his PC if it would help. The best prospect for identifying the causes, though, is if we can reproduce the problems on a PC that has all our development and debugging tools installed.

In the meantime, in the case of the empty message on shutting down, please do be reassured that all the evidence points to something harmless.

I will post back here as soon as we have anything to concrete to report, and in any case I will post with an update before the end of this week.

[brucet]

We believe we have identified the reason why the error message on shutdown is blank. While we are continuing to investigate the underlying cause, we are going to fix the error message, so that at least we can find out what it's trying to tell us. That should make it significantly easier to track down the root issue. I will post here when a build with that fix in it is available.

We do now have one PC in the company that reproduces the error consistently, which should also help us.

[Jenny]

Bruce
I wish the actinicshipping.fil message would go. Sometimes it just will not upload. I dont get the close down message but this is a major problem especially with a large site!
Jenny

[Rollerboy]

That should make it significantly easier to track down the root issue. I will post here when a build with that fix in it is available.
We do now have one PC in the company that reproduces the error consistently, which should also help us.

Good news. I appreciate you dontt think it is anything to wory about, but it is, none the less quite disconcerting. HGopefully this will be cleared up soon.

[brucet]

Progress update

Unfortunately our fix to prevent blank error messages did not work for this particular message :-( But we've identified another couple of loopholes in the code that could account for blank error messages, and will plug those ASAP.

We have identified one issue that can cause Actinic to crash on exit following an upload, on both Windows 7 and Vista. We are confident there are no harmful side effects, but we are working on a fix for this, and continuing to investigate the other issues.

[feemish]

thanks for the update on this.

[brucet]

In v10.0.2 we are adding an improvement to the installation process which means that Actinic will run in Windows 7 native mode, whereas before it ran in Vista compatibility mode. We are hoping to release v10.0.2 in the next week or so.

Unfortunately we don't think this will fix any of the issues here, although it's not impossible. But it may improve performance.

I'm off on holiday for a couple of weeks, but I've asked our QA team to keep an eye on this thread and to post any further progress we make.

[Jenny]

I have had more success after following this advice :
http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=47775
Not one failure with v10 this afternoon.
Jenny

[brucet]

Correction to my post above, the change to enable running in Windows 7 native mode will not be introduced until v10.0.3.

[Duncan Rounding]

Did you try this: http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=47775 Louise? - not sure if it's relevant to Vista but I presume it may be.

[Clive.Aspen]

My boss still wont use actinic because it shows an empty error box every time we close actinic.
I understand that this error may just be a phantom error... but my boss says 'its an ecommerce program connected to psps.. how can he take risks with security.. if it says theres an error then maybe there is..' and he wont risk it.

He has got me looking at other ecommerce programs that work without errors.. and unfortunately for actinic, the others dont. I liked actinic, I used v7 in the past which is why I was keen to use actinic again, but v10 isnt stable.

I was told this would be fixed, about 2 months ago.. but the 10.0.2 is out and the issue isnt addressed. From reading this thread, this error is happening to lots of people. I really dont understand why actinic are just letting this go..? Do you not realise that people are talking to each other and saying v10 is not stable dont use it.
I'm very surprised that this issue wasnt sorted immediately. It has undermined confidence in actinic. My boss has had enough of waiting for it to work without error and is now telling me I must find a different ecommerce solution. I'm baffled by actinic not sorting this

[Benjamin Dyer]

Hi Clive,

'its an ecommerce program connected to psps.. how can he take risks with security.. if it says theres an error then maybe there is..' and he wont risk it.

I appreciate the blank box is an irritation to many, as discussed in this thread it is being addressed in our next maintenance release. Why it may sound like a trivial dialogue box being displayed by mistake, and easily fixable, we are committed to understanding why its being displayed and resolving it properly.

I can guarantee this is nothing to do with PSPs, calculations or orders. The problem lies with a DLL found in Vista and Widows 7, its now fixed.

I really dont understand why actinic are just letting this go..? Do you not realise that people are talking to each other and saying v10 is not stable dont use it.

As mentioned in this thread, we are not, however any bug fix has to fall within our release schedule. Rushing builds out for resolve specific problems tends to introduce issues. Our QA process is very detailed and due to the large number of configurations (OS, Service Pack, software, hosting, PSP etc etc) we need to test a great deal.

IMO v10 is both very stable and reliable, of course there are always examples of bugs and problems but software quality is our number one priority. If nothing else I think this has been demonstrated in the way we conduct our beta testing and the communication we have with our customer base.

[Rollerboy]

any news on this ?

[brucet]

We are about to start testing a second attempt at fixing the blank error message on exit, to be included in v10.0.3. Because it's blank we're still not 100% certain where it's coming from, so it's a bit of a process of elimination.

[brucet]

After extensive testing of the fix for the blank error on exit, we've been unable to reproduce the issue on two machines that presented it before. So we're confident we now have the solution.

Having isolated the cause, we can also say with confidence that the bug is harmless. It's purely a crash on exiting the application, and there is no risk of any kind of data loss or corruption.

The fix will be in v10.0.3, which we hope to release as a beta in a few weeks. I will post here as soon as it's available. It will also include the other Windows 7 work, some performance improvements for larger sites, some more Actinic Payments enhancements, and other bug fixes.