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Crystal Reports 2011 Problem

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I installed Crystal Reports Developer 2011 on 2 Windows XP workstations and everything worked correctly. I then installed 2 additional Crystal Reports components, a stand-alone CR Viewer and a stand-alone unlicensed Designer add-on that I thought I would be able to insert a license key into later once we purchased it. Once these steps were complete, everything worked correctly, except the one unlicensed component of course. Now, five days later, the main CR Developer application will open, but it hangs up as soon as it loads and the cursor remains an hour glass. I tried repairing the software and that didn’t work. I also tried uninstalling the unlicensed portion to see if that would help. The application doesn’t even work under an administrator profile. Any ideas? Could a Windows update affect this application? TIA 🙂

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In reply to Crystal Reports 2011 Problem

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Is system restore enabled?

In reply to Crystal Reports 2011 Problem

If so, I would get rid of the viewer and designer add-ons by restoring to the working state before you installed them.

Any events show up in system event logs? Can you see what process is hanging?

Getting these apps to ‘play well’ together may be no simple task.

At a high level, you could load some of the Microsoft systernals debugging tools such as regmon and filemon, or run the application in a debugger to see where it crashes. If your life depended on figuring this out, I would load up an install-monitor to see what specifc registry changes, DLL or Com add-ins were added, and then monitor what program objects are getting loaded with regmon/filemon. Of course these are all things the developer of the app should have done before you get to be the guinea pig….

Or install the app in a sandbox program like Sandboxie. Sandboxie will show you exactly what the app does when it installs and of course does not really make those changes to the system, it makes them within the sandbox.

An alternate way to ‘Sandbox’ nasty apps is to load XP as a guest OS under VMware (that’s what I do at home). VMware snapshots will ALWAYS return you to a working state, not matter what mayhem an application has done to the OS.

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