Office Hours not responding
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- Posts: 40
- Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2007 10:34 am
Office Hours not responding
Through a little investigation, I've found a way to get the programs to operate correctly (until the next time they decide to go south). Maybe this would be of some value to the Medisoft development team...
If you start the Office Hours application, it will successfully get beyond the splash screen, then open the main (full-screen) window. The main window will partially paint and then freeze. The usual result is an Office Hours window that displays the window title and the remainder of the window is white. Sometimes the top menu bar, or some of the tan background shading will paint before the application locks up.
Watching the events above as they occur via Windows Task Manager reveals some additional information. Initialy, one \"Office Hours\" task in created and it is hooked to a single \"OHP.exe\" process. Just before Office Hours hangs, a second \"Office Hours\" task starts, this one is linked to the main \"explorer.exe\" process (your desktop!).
I believe, in Task Manager, the mechanism that allows you to \"End task\" from the Applications tab, and the method used to \"End Process\" from the Processes tab, work in a much different manner. \"End Task\" being a fairly civilized shutdown of an application, and \"End Process\" being a crude blow-it-out-of-the-water process kill.
There are two tasks and two processes you could potentially terminate.
If you end either Office Hours task, the one hooked to the OHP.exe process, or the one hooked to the explorer.exe process, Office Hours will eventually terminate, and generate a \"hungapp\" error via Windows Error Reporting. If you kill the OHP.exe process, the same result manifests. So, three of the four possibilities for zapping the hung program behave the same, and all LEAVE OFFICE HOURS INOPERATIVE ON THE PC.
I believe the \"civilized\" nature of \"End Task\", checking dependencies, etc, prevents you from actually killing your desktop when you select to end the task attached to explorer.exe, and instead it kills the actual OHP.exe process and doing that releases the link to explorer.exe.
Here is the interesting part...
If you instead do the fourth option, the odd choice of killing the explorer.exe process (your desktop) while the OHP.exe task is hooked to it and hung up, the following occurs:
Your desktop goes bye-bye, no more icons, no taskbars, no start menu. Your PC is not very useful at this stage, and your only recourse is to do a \"restart\" via the still open Task Manager. Strangely, after the reboot, OFFICE HOURS IS FIXED. It will start normally, repeatedly, and appears to work perfectly. Something is being unregistered, or cleared from the registry, or something reset when forcing the desktop to close while OHP is hooked to it and hung up. Maybe I'll do a before and after comparison of the hives while performing this \"fix\" on one of our bad machines, or see if any cfg or ini files change, or...
Anyway, at this point I do have a crude fix to employ when Office Hours (or Medisoft) decides to stop running on one of our machines.
What do you think???
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- Posts: 40
- Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2007 10:34 am
Anyway, at this point, I do have the crude fix posted above to employ when Office Hours (or Medisoft) decides to stop running on one of our machines.
What do you think???
PS - I did find a few links elsewhere on the web that appear to indicate there are others that experience this same problem, such as this recent post:
Medisoft and Office Hours Freezing
- Gavin Walker
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- Joined: Wed Apr 04, 2007 10:11 pm
- Location: Springfield, MO
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I have suspected for a long time that an incompatibility with how the .NET Framework is installed causes this. Uninstalling or installing Windows XP SP 3 can fix this.
There are apps that are known to be incompatible with Medisoft. For example McAfee Antivirus and some instant messaging software.
Walker Tek Solutions, LLC
417-890-6777 x0
fax: 417-763-6386
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A few more reboots and over the weekend, and one of our problem machines reverted.
That method does indeed work though, at least for the next session, and gets Office Hours up and running. So, although it is by no means a permanent fix, I think it may be useful for debugging the issue. I'm going to do a bit more sleuthing and see if I can determine any differences in the environment when comparing a normal PC startup, and one following a forced desktop crash while OH is hung up.
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Re: Office Hours not responding
- Gavin Walker
- Posts: 4625
- Joined: Wed Apr 04, 2007 10:11 pm
- Location: Springfield, MO
- Contact:
Re: Office Hours not responding
For example, you have an appointment that starts at 7:59am but the appointment window is from 8am to 5pm.
Or, you have a 159 minute appointment, but your minimum appointment time period is set to 15 minute increments.