Wide Open Office Can't See Key - 05/19/07 01:06 AM
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!
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!