Hello,

I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but I have no other way
of explaining the problem without getting into much detail.  I am having a
bothersome version problem with 2 ActiveX controls in MS Access 97, namely
comdlg32.ocx and comctl32.ocx. and I was wondering if anyone else has
encountered this problem.  I have searched the MS Knowledge Base and havent
had much luck finding a dependable solution.

Heres the scenario:

I am developing applications on MS Access 97 but also have Visual Basic on
my machine in order to develop other types of products.  In my database
application, I am using the common dialog control (comdlg32.ocx) and say the
slider control (comctl32.ocx).  Now, while in Access I go into the
references to see which libraries I am using it tells me Im referencing
version 5 of both controls.  Thats fine.  Also, all the other users in the
company have those versions of the control.  Now heres where the problem
comes in to play.  I have installed the new version of MS Developers Studio
6.  In doing so, those 2 controls have been overwritten to version 6.  When
I now bring up my database in Access and go into the references, it now says
Im referring to version 6 of those controls and the application works on my
machine.

When I proceed to roll out a new version of this database and bring it up on
a users machine, the database will spit out error messages upon running
some code from any library, even VBA for applications.  Even mid and
instr functions will not run.  The reason for this is that Access is not
seeing the new version of those controls and if I look at the references
from another PC that has a full version of Access it will tell me the
references to those 2 controls is missing.  As soon a one library is
missing, then it seems that Access sees all other libraries as missing and
then thats why it doesnt like functions from other libraries.

My solution to this was to have the original version 5 of the controls
backed up, and I copied them back to my machine.  I unregistered the new
version of them, and then registered the original ones.  I then go into
Access and re-reference to version 5 controls, and then I roll out the
database again and this works.  The problem now is if I go to Visual Basic
6, it wont start up because it tells me I need the newer version of those
controls to run VB.

I thought that another solution could be to rollout the newer versions of
the controls on all the users desktops, but I wouldnt know what possible
side effects this could have in terms of having a newer version of an
ActiveX control running with older versions of software.

If anyone has experienced this problem or has any ideas of a way to get
around it, it would be much appreciated.  Thank you in advance for taking

ideas/suggestions.  Thanks again.

Roberto

It happened to me also. It was when I installed comctl32.dll when client
machines started behaving freaky. It seems that most microsoft apps are not
yet upgraded to talk with the new dlls. What I did was to scale back to the
previous dll and abandon the upgrade until later when distributing them
become stable. It seems that distributing those new dlls make things go
haywire.

We were toltally dependent on IE 4.0 and that version doesn't have the
comctl32.dll functionality. So we'll wait till our users upgrade their
browsers to a version were comctl32 is standard. Somehow it takes time
propagating dlls to end users.

Thanks for that. Now I know someone has encountered this.