I seem to have had a number of problems lately with a particular user who is running into issues trying to open an Access application multiple times. When doing so, the second instance will shutdown, but before doing so will display a box saying that Access already has the file open (it is doing a check to see if the file can accept a write lock because if it’s already open this will fail).
The user swears he is only double clicking the shortcut once and still is getting the error message.
In the latest iteration, he got an error just when opening the app at all and it shut down, then he “simply” tried to double click one time on the icon and the app came up along with the error message.
So what is my path here for ensuring the application gets opened properly?
I’m considering making launching the application only able to complete by using a command line flag.
But first, I really need to check all the areas where this message could be prompted from.
I might actually have some overlap in the launcher app code (which checks for the latest version, copies it to the user’s %LOCALAPPDATA% folder if needed, and runs it), and the app itself which contains the launcher code because I used to just have them open the app and it would do all this checking on it’s own and launch a local copy for them.
Ah, the possibilities are endless with Access and VBA. Also, I could add logging for the launcher to ensure that there is not some weird hardware or driver bug that is actually causing his double click to register twice.
So, my take away strategy here:
- Add logging to the launcher to append to a log file when launching occurs. I can double check that the system isn’t somehow opening the launcher twice.
- Double check my app code to make sure the error message isn’t getting triggered there somehow in the startup routine or doing any lock checks. It actually might be doing something like that when it starts up a session now that I think about it. Why no one else seems to be experiencing this is a mystery I may never solve!