Error 5000 - Could not lock file - EarthLink related?

Error 5000 - Could not lock file - EarthLink related?

Posted by: gbucci on 4 August 2017, 6:01 am EST

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  gbucci

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  Posted 4 August 2017, 6:01 am EST

  This is a new shade of “5000”!
  
  
  
  We have a customer who called our customer support team complaining about reports not generating. This ERROR 5000 was a strange one, with extended info of “Could not lock file.” He had this problem on not one, but two machines (both PowerSpec brand, and may be identical); both machines were running XP Pro, half-gig RAM, 2GHz CPU - machines with good specs. We tried many different tactics to try to fix it. After about two days of trying, our customer said he was going to return our product (and who could blame him after all that?).
  
  
  
  We easily have a few thousand customers using essentially the same software successfully producing reports. We had a few who needed some finagling moves to get the reporting to work (such as installing AR2 SP4 prior to installation of our product). Otherwise this was the first time we couldn’t get anything good to happen.
  
  
  
  Then, this morning the same customer calls us back and informs us the he’s got it working!
  
  
  
  His fix: He removed the software that came with his EarthLink account.
  
  
  
  Anyone else out there been seeing this flavor of “5000”?
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

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  ali-dd

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  Posted 4 August 2017, 6:01 am EST

  Did he get additional number like “CP Internal = XX” in the details of the error? Probably the EarthLink access was blocking the data connection or something. Did he have the problem when only one of the two machines was running?
  
  

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  gbucci

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  Posted 4 August 2017, 6:01 am EST

  Nope, no “CP Internal = XX”.
  
  
  
  The problem was there with only one machine running the app (the second machine was only used as a second try - this is not a multi-user app - and the problem arose before installing the app on the second machine). The data connection is to a MS JET *.mdb database (aka MS Access) on the local harddrive.
  
  
  
  
  
  

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  ali-dd

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  Posted 4 August 2017, 6:01 am EST

  Does the user using the application have write permissions to the folder where the Access database is located? “The Could not lock File” error is not an ActiveReports error but an Access and it occurs when the user doesn’t have write permission to the folder and tries to access the database after some other user has logged in. Please ask your customer to check these and post back his findings.
  
  

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  gbucci

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  Posted 4 August 2017, 6:01 am EST

  Thank you, Ali, for your interest and your help, it is appreciated!
  
  
  
  Yep, that was the very first thing we tried. We checked (that is to say checked to see it unchecked) the Read Only attribute on all files. We viewed the security ACL on the folder and on the files. We even copied the application to the root level of the system drive (C:) to (hopefully) avoid Windows security policy issues and (again hopefully) side-step any anti-virus shenanigans, and gave Everyone full access rights, with still “No joy.” Besides, the customer was running on the Administrator account, so this sort of thing (write permissions) normally should not be happening.
  
  
  
  In any case, the app itself is making constant access to the very same set of *.mdb files, and performs a few writes “behind-the-scenes” prior to launching ActiveReports. In other words, if write permissions were the issue, the app should be crashing on a lot of other functions. Yet, before the call to customer service, our customer was able to perform setup operations, enter employee records, and collect time tracking data. And at the time of the call, the customer was still able to do all those things - all of them things that perform writes to the database. Only report generation could not be done.
  
  
  
  I don’t think we can pester our customer any further on this, since he did finally make it work after removing EarthLink.
  
  
  
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  In doing some reseach, it seems that the file locking issue might be related to a registry setting:
  
  
  
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305995
  
  PRB: Error “3050 Could Not Lock File” When You Connect to a Jet Database on a Novell Server
  
  Registry setting: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Jet 4.0\MaxLocksPerFile
  
  
  
  Also, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815281
  
  "File sharing lock count exceeded…” error message during large transaction processing
  
  
  
  I wonder if playing around with that if the problem can be reproduced?
  
  
  
  

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  ali-dd

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  Posted 4 August 2017, 6:01 am EST

  You posted in your first post that the problem was solved when the EarthLink software was removed but I thought you are interested in finding out the reason in case you faced the problem again. So I asked our developer to do a full search for the error message and he told me that Error 5000 is a data error but the lock error message is returned by the Jet engine. A search on the internet returned many possibilities for this error one of them was the one I told you about and then you found others.
  
  It would have been good to find exactly how this software interfered with your software but as you said you cannot “pester” your customer. You can talk to EarthLink and describe the problem. For now at least you have one other thing to check if you encounter the problem with another customer. Thanks for sharing this with us.