Tip of the Month for: February 2018
Microsoft December/January/February Windows 7 Update Issues
We have had several reports of users running Answers on Windows 7 PC's receiving random Error 3707 and Error 9300 messages on temporary files starting in December, January and February. From all indications from working with multiple customers, their IT staff and Micro Focus (who develops the AcuCobol Runtime that runs all Answers programs) the cause has been traced to the Microsoft patches that were released in December (KB4054518) and January (KB4056894) and subsequent months such as February. From what we have found thus far, these patches included a fix related to the accessing of Microsoft Office files. However, they are somehow affecting the AcuCobol Runtime's and thus Answers ability to delete temporary files that were created for working and sorting at random times. When these occur, they can result in an Error 3707 or in some rarer cases an Error 9300.
It is important to understand that some Error 9300's are legitimate and are not to be considered a symptom of this problem, such as when one user tries to update a journal while another user is still in the program that inputs data into it.
It is also important to note that thus far this issue only seems to affect Windows 7 PC's. We have not nor has Micro Focus had any reports of it affecting other versions of Windows such as XP, 8 or 10. We also have no evidence of this being a problem on servers including users that access a server via Remote Desktop such as branch locations or users travelling or working from home. It also appears that users running AcuServer on their server for their data access do not exhibit this problem due to the improved fault-tolerance access provided by AcuServer versus Winidows mapped drives.
We therefore regretfully recommend that Windows 7 users that are accessing a server without AcuServer installed and that have received these Error 3707's or 9300's remove these Microsoft updates (KB4054518 and KB4056894 as well as any from February) from their Windows Updates if found on their PC in an attempt to mitigate the annoyance caused by these random errors. You may need to consult with your in-house IT support person or your outside IT support company on doing this for more details. But they typically can be found by going into Windows Updates and Update History on a Windows 7 PC.
In most cases, these randomly occurring errors are aggravating in that they can seemingly stop what you are doing, but since they are almost always at the conclusion of a process when a temp file is attempting to be deleted, usually no harm is done when these errors do occur.
The one exception to the above statement is if one of these errors occurs after responding yes to update a journal. This includes journals such as the A/P Purchase Journal, A/P Disbursements Journal, Cash Receipts Journals, Inventory Stock Receipts Journal, Inventory Adjustments/Transaction Register, etc. While this list is not a complete list, the general exception is that if an error is encountered after you have answered Yes to update a journal, then we highly recommend emailing the exact error or a screen-shot of it to our support address at support@drcanswers.com so that we can quickly determine if the file reported in your error may need to be manually deleted in order to avoid any duplicate postings.
We will update our news page if and when more information becomes available on this situation caused by these Microsoft updates as we hope the removal of these is only a short-term solution and that something more permanent may be forth-coming.