atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems Comdial Telephones & Systems Wide Open Office Can't See Key

I have a customer with Wide Open Office installed on a CPE PC. It's worked fine for some time, but recently would come up with Wide Open Office unable to see the key, and end up running in Demo mode. I had originally setup Windows to automatically log in and then lock, so WOO (in the Startup folder) would load. Like I said, it's worked fine for quite a while, and then stopped. The PC is running Windows XP Pro.

I found that If I shut down WOO, and then restarted it manually, it would have no problem seeing the key. Furthermore, if I pulled WOO out of the startup folder, waited for Windows to log in, and the start WOO manually, it also worked ok.

We tried replacing the parallel port (on the motherboard) with a PCI parallel port card, but that just made things worse, as I was unable to ever get the key to work on that port.

I have no idea what caused the original parallel port to have problems, or what's causing the problem.

I ended up making up a work-around, which consisted of a batch file that started in the Startup folder, replacing WOO. The batch file has a 30 second delay, and then starts WOO. Problem resolved. It took me quite a while to write the batch file and tweak it to work out the various bugs, but I finally got it. I actually found, in my testing, that even a 5-second delay corrected the problem. Not sure what's going on. I'm just glad my work-around worked.

If anyone has any feedback on this, hopefully to maybe help explain the cause of the problem, I would greatly appreciate it.

If anyone else runs into this and wants to see the batch file, let me know.

Thanks!

If the computer is running automatic updates from Windows, shut that feature off. Microsoft has had a habit of late of "improving" the operating system and changing settings and even programs that you were using to suit what they believe the world should be. Shutting off the automatic update will stop a lot of problems in the future.

This is an issue that has been around for awhile. The issue is that only one program can access the key (dongle)at once. So if the voicemail is reading the key and the WOO tries to access it. It will fail.

Comdial came out with a small program called Smartstart. It does just what you have done. You add it to the startup menu and you can add different programs to start after a certain time. You set the time when you add the program. If you can not find this on the Comical website email me.

This was a real mess when they had Interchange, WOO and QuickQ on the same machine.

Keep in mind that the voicemail has a delay built into it to allow other programs to read the key upon boot up. The voicemail delay I think is 1 minute.

I usually have WOO start after about 90 seconds.

Kudos for your work around!!!

I've had to use the Avalon smart start batch also. It allowed the voice mail to start then 90 seconds later started WOO.

BD3C, I'm glad to see you're still around, how ever much you're able to be. I think I can speak for others when I say we missed having your expertise around here.

I'll shoot you an email soon, to request it (thanks).

What's strange is that this is a stand-alone WOO PC. VM is on a separate machine. I had ended up moving it to its own machine after running into too many problems when they were on the same machine.

I had gone thru the whole VM, WOO, and QQ on the same FXS (dog) machine. I can't believe they even considered that, in retrospect. On paper it sounded great, but it was WAY more than that machine (barely a P1, running Windows NT 4.0) could EVER handle effectively. Heck, it lagged just handling VM! I still carry wounds from when a VM/WOO/QQ FXS PC's lost its drive. That was a VERY long day! That could very well be when I started getting gray hairs (RBF has dealt with many more than me, I can see ).

Har de har har. It can go gray as long as it will stay.