Error Message

[bgill]

Hi,
I'd be grateful if someone could help me out here.

I am getting an error message from Access which says

'MSACCESS.exe has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program.
An error log is being created'

What error log? Where is it? I cant find anything that looks like an error log. Is there a default location for Access error logs, or is there a particular filename or type for these errors.

Any help much appreciated!

[KnooKie]

Perhaps it is referring to the event logs.

Anyway, have you tried repairing the database ?

[bgill]

Hi,
I checked the event logs, but there is nothing there. I will try to explain the problem I am having.
Firstly I am not at all familiar with access, as I work mainly with Oracle.
The problem is with an access database that was designed by my boss (who is on holiday). He appears to have applied some security options to the database so that all the normal menu options are unavailable to me, I cant even see the sql view of the queries. The application works like this:
I open the database, am presented with a form,click a button and all the processing is done in the background. What it is supposed to do is import some data from an Oracle database on my production server, and generate reports for department managers.
This started to fail last week with the MSACCESS.exe error, but the strange thing is it only fails when I run it against my production database. I restored a copy of the production database to my test server, ran the Access app again and it works fine (takes about 2 minutes. So I am assuming that the Access database doesn't need to be repaired.
There are basically 3 queries in this application, and I can determine the order that they are run by looking at the macros. I tried running each query one at a time and discovered the following:

query 1 ( connects to the Oracle database, deletes one row from an access database table and inserts a new row which is a date taken from a table in Oracle)This query works fine.

query 2 (deletes rows from an access table and repopulates this table with data from Oracle) This query works, although it takes about 15 minutes as opposed to 1.5 minutes on the test server.

query 3 (deletes data from an access table and re-populates it with data from the table created in query 2 together with some data from some other access tables).
This query fails, I get the MSACCESS.exe error, access shuts down and no reports are generated.

The strange thing is is that if I immediately open Access again and manually re-run query 3, it works! and I can then produce my reports.

I am not sure where to look next so thats why I would like to get a look at this mysterious logfile that Access says is being created. I was thinking maybe that I had a network problem (due to length of time for query 2 to run), but then again I have over 300 in house users and 50 branch offices connected to the production database and they are having no performance problems at all. Whats more, these reports are run at night after end of day when no users are connected.
So thats it. I'm stumped at the moment!

Any suggestions?

[MAK]

1. Look in to task manager and see how many MSAccess.exe is running. If there are too many kill all of them or restart the machine.

2. restart the machine and try again all the queries.

[bgill]

Hi,
I've tried that already, no other msaccess.exe running. Also tried on freshly rebooted machine, and in fact tried from several different workstations(accesss database is on a network drive). Same result each time.
ie. I get the error when run against prod database but not against copy of prod on test server. If I restart access I can then run query 3 and produce reports.
Very strange!


Thanks for the replies

[bgill]

Hello again,
I just need to know where Access puts this log file it says it's creating.
Why is it such a mystery? Surely if an application is providing log files or dump files there should be a default directory or location where they are created. At least in Oracle there is always a specified location for tracefiles or dumps.
Ok, even if I can find this elusive log file, it might not mean anything to me, but if I am trying to trace an error why does the whole process seem so opaque?
How can I attempt to solve this problem if I cant find and read a log which this error says it has generated? Or am I wasting my time because said log file will be incomprehensible to mere mortals or will just have a generic "General Protection Fault" or some such totally unhelpful explanation?

[bgill]

Hi,
problem solved. was network issue after all.
Changed nic on unix server from 100 half duplex to 100 full and query runs in under 2 mins now.