Hope

After beating my brains out over Access crashing/burning without letting me save my design work, I tried a very general Usenet group search (but specifically for Microsoft Access) for the dreaded "Microsoft is sorry" error message. I was able to verify that all Windows XP and Access 2003 and Jet 4.0 are all up to date and that none of the PC-specific suggestions were causing my problems. It kept coming back to the suggestion that my database file (.mdb) [actually it's everything but the database] probably has cancer lurking within.

I've spent time writing programs to compact/repair outside of Access, and to copy all objects, references, and properties into a new .mdb. But it seems something was missing. It appears that I need to decompile when things start going funny. (Not ha-ha funny.) I had added a shortcut that would let me right-click on an .mdb file and chose decompile to decompile that .mdb, but it stopped working when I upgraded to Access 2003. I rewrote that right-click command from scratch and it worked!

Now I have these features available as menu items when I right-click on an .mdb file in Windows Explorer:

Decompile
Compact and Repair*
Archive

If those won't make the .mdb crash less often, then I run another program which copies everything to a new .mdb and I begin again.

The development process now involves saving whatever I'm working on several times a minute. Every time I make enough changes that I'd hate to do them again, I exit out and compact and repair then archive.

This nonsense has let me get back to rapid development.

Many thanks to Geoff Hollander and Steve Titus of PAUG for listening to my problems and not replying, "It must have been something you did." Thanks also the the World Wide Web and books on Access annoyances.

= )

*Yes, I know there is a built-in menu item under Tools to do this. Unfortunately, it does such a poor job, I use my program, which is essentially a one-line command supported by quite a bit of code to set things up.