After a week or so I started looking through the applications I work on and found some issues with some of the fonts; they were too big in Windows 7.  Now, if you went through a Windows upgrade before this may come a no surprise; I remember some issues going from Win95 to Win 2000 to Win XP back in the day.  Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

Now these buttons had MS Sans Serif font sized at 9 point.

So I tasked myself with going through each window/visual object in the application libraries to check for this.  The last thing I want to have  happen is my apps to go to customers looking like crap.

Lo and behold you don’t need to do this.  The answer is a setting in Windows.

Right Click on the desktop:

Choose ‘Personalize’

Choose ‘Display’

Make sure you are using the default setting.

Now things are fine:

Now this seemed to only be an issue with MS Sans Serif  so I’m not sure if there are other fonts to be concerned with or not.

Ah Ha! The user is running a Windows 7 workstation.
Ah Ha! The user doesn’t have the correct SQL Server native driver.
Ah Ha! The user has older PB runtime DLLs.

Nope, another Windows 7 workstation runs fine.
Nope, the driver is the same.
Nope, the runtimes are correct.

After setting up the window to create a text file containing the specific strings used to create the datawindow I see that a replace I am doing after it is generated by the SyntaxFromSql but prior to the Create is jumbling up the string. Now the reason it is jumbling it up is I assumed the value I was looking for was a static value and since the Pos method couldn’t find the proper place it came back with zero which tells the replace to start at the beginning of the string and screwed up the Release number.

I noticed a number of positional/size parameters were different in the two sets of files as well.

In Windows XP:

 release 12.5;
 datawindow(units=1 timer_interval=0 color=16777215
 processing=1 print.margin.bottom=24 print.margin.left=24
 print.margin.right=24 print.margin.top=24...

In Windows 7:

 release 12.5;
 datawindow(units=1 timer_interval=0 color=16777215
 processing=1 print.margin.bottom=30 print.margin.left=30
 print.margin.right=30 print.margin.top=30...

Notice the difference in the print.margin settings.

The datawindow presentation style is:

 "style( type=Grid              &
       Horizontal_spread = 25 )      &
       datawindow( units=1           &
       Color= 16777215)              &
       column( Font.Face='Arial'     &
           Font.Height=-9            &
           Font.Weight=400)          &
           text(   Font.Face='Arial' &
           Font.Height=-9            &
           Font.Weight=400           &
               Border=6)"

Which got me thinking about the font on the individual machines.

A post to the Sybase Powerbuilder Datawindow forum gave me the following:

Hi Matt;

I suspect you are correct when you say that the fonts are different.

—
Regards … Chris
President: OSUG / STD Inc.
Vice President: ISUG
Blog: http://chrispollach.blogspot.com
SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/stdfndclass
PBDJ: http://chrispollach.sys-con.com

Thanks to Chris Pollach.

The ‘moral’ to this is you should explicitly set the various properties of the datawindow object after the create if you need to ensure a specific positional value is required to account for differences in user environments.

Now the issue hits. Something goes wrong and now I am getting the message that an install is in progress and I can’t install anything else. The infamous “Installshield error 1500: Another installation is in progress”.

The fix is fairly simple, at least on Windows 7. Run ‘Regedit’ to edit the registry. Find the Key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\InProgress” and delete it (don’t just remove the current value but delete the entire key value). Check to see if the msiserver process is running (in the Task Manager) – it it is kill it. Check to see if the msiserver service is running (Control Panel – Administrative Tools – Services) and stop it if it is.

Now you can install whatever it is you were attempting to when you got the error.

Furthermore you find out the client is running the application in a Citrix session; Aha! that’s the culprit. Well, not really.

You can reproduce this on a Windows XP workstation (running PB11.5 code) by bringing up your desktop properties – appearance tab – windows and buttons dropdown and choosing ‘Windows Classic’.

Changing this to Windows XP will correct the issue.

As a side note for Citrix this is controlled by the ‘Desktop Experience’ feature installed on the server. Windows Classic is a default (and the only option) if this is not installed.