Announce.exe error at program start

Hello,

I get a Dr. Watson error in announce.exe as an access violation when I run Caesar II.

I am running on a Win NT 4.0 SP6a client on a Netware 5.1 network, and have lots of disk space and RAM.

The program seems to run OK with a data file (xxx._A file) anyway. As I am the IT admin., not a piping engineer, has anyone seen this error? Is it a big concern?

I have checked the FAQ, website, and help files in the program. Even did a Google search, with no luck.

Thanks for any help you may be,

Matt

The announce.exe and announce.bin files are there just to provide an initial announcement to users following an installation (either new or a build). These "announcements" consist of a short list of the recent changes, or an important instruction.

These announcements are designed to only show 4 times. This is accomplished by updating "announce.bin" with each execution of announce.exe. You are the first to report a failure in this procedure.

My first suspicion is that you don't have the \caesar\system directory setup to allow users to "write" to this directory? This is a requirement (and the whole reason \system exists).

Please advise if this is indeed the problem.

Richard,

thank you for the prompt reply! We have the standard setup for the program; don't see why it would not be set up with the user able to write to the system directory. In any case, I don't know how to check if this is so.

A \system directory exists under caesar on the workstation.

There is a message that flashes VERY fast under the announce.exe error. someting about an ESL. I checked this, and the ESL log data looks OK, as does crc check. The program would quit if it didn't find an ESL, right?

I'm trying to locate a user at this office who can try out the program for me...

Thanks again for any further help you might offer.

Matt Pey

You're correct in assuming that if the ESL wasn't working you couldn't run the program. However, the "announce" business doesn't touch the ESL, but I'm sure that is not the problem.

On a Novell system, I believe the "FLAG" command is what is used to ensure uses have the necessary rights to a directory. For example, "flag *.* ros" sets all files to "read only" and "share" in the current directory. I don't remember how to set files to "read-write".

I'm still thinking there is an access problem with "announce.bin". If you can't resolve the problem, rename "announce.bin" to something else. This shouldn't cause any problems.

Richard,

Thanks again for your help.

The program is on my PC, so I must have rights to all directories. Given that, I had a user confirm that the program is working properly.

I then renamed announce.bin, and upon opening the program, get no error. I'm going to leave it like that, and go on to my next challenge!

Thanks so for your help!

Matt Pey

Ok, fine. But, with each new build you download from our website, you will get a new "announce.bin" highlighting the most important changes. So if this file is a problem for you, you will have to rename it with each update.