LAN, which has about a dozen windows xp professional PCs and one professional PC Windows 7.
The jet / access '97 database file acts as a database.
The acccess method is through dao (DAO350.dll), and the front-end application is written in vb6. When an instance is created, it immediately opens the global database object, which it keeps open throughout its life.
The Windows 7 machine has acted as a file server for the past few months without any crashes.
Over the past week, it happened that the application instances will work for some time (say, 30 minutes) on xp-machines, and then will fail when working with the database, report connection errors (for example, a disk or network error or not I can find such and such a table. Instances on a Windows 7 machine work fine.
Moving the database file to one of the xp computers causes the application to work fine on ALL xp machines, but instead an error occurs on the Windows 7 machine.
Before the problem became apparent, a newer version of the application was installed. Uninstalling and installing a previous version did not solve the problem.
No other changes to the network that I know of have been made, although Iām not quite sure about this, since the guy apparently visited at about the same time when there were problems, perhaps even to do something, as for online data backup. (There is data storage on multiple computers). Obviously, he did not go next to the win 7 machine.
Finally, I don't know much about networks, so please forgive me if the information I provide here is redundant or insufficient.
I tried to disable the antivirus on win 7 machine, restart, etc., but nothing works.
It is planned to move our database from the plane to the sql express server in the future.
I need some suggestions regarding the possible reasons for this so that I can explore it further. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE 02/02/2011
The problem was solved by the hardware guy who visited the client today. The problem was that on this particular local network, the IP addresses were allocated dynamically, with the exception of the Win 7 machine, which had a static IP address. The static address was within the range from which the dynamic addresses were selected. This was not a problem until last week, when a dynamic address was created that corresponded to the static one and caused the problems described above.
Thanks to everyone for their input and thank you for not closing the question. Having smart, knowledgeable people for calls is a great help when you are under pressure from an unhappy customer, and gaps in your own knowledge mean that you cannot confidently say that your software is certainly not to blame.