Shared Knowledge
“VFP Applications and Spyware Doctor”
I have a financial application
I developed using Microsoft’s Visual Fox Pro (VFP) Version 5.0 database
management application development software.
Recently, when I went to use
a particular function of the financial application, my application crashed. I was mystified as I had not done any source
code work in some time and upon checking the source code, could find nothing
wrong with it.
I then assumed that perhaps
the databases the applications uses had been corrupted somehow and procured
several tools to fix corrupt databases but when I ran these tools, no errors
were found.
Finally, I begin to think
about applications I had recently added to my computer that could somehow be
impacting my financial database application.
Sometime ago, I had a very
nasty virus and could not get rid of it until I procured Spyware
Doctor, a very robust antivirus and spyware removal
tool.
Experiment. I turned off Spyware Doctor
completely and my application ran fine. So Spyware
Doctor was impacting my application, but how.
Upon examining the settings
of Spyware Doctor, “File Guard” actually checks every
disk file that is created or copied and once I turned off this specific
function, my application ran fine with all other Spyware
Doctor functions active.
My theory on why Spyware Doctor causes my VFP database application to fail
is that when I am manipulating a table with 1000’s of records, such as in a
copy operation, my application finishes a copy command and moves on to the next
source code instruction but Spyware Doctor only then
begins to scan the copied table for virus and spyware
and locks the table until it is finished. Meanwhile, my application has moved
on and could be trying to execute an operation on the copied table whereupon
the operation fails because the table is not available or free of Spyware Doctor yet.
Although I am saying I had a problem with Spyware Doctor with my VFP database application, I can see where most applications would not be impacted by the actions of Spyware Doctor. But if you do have a database application and start seeing strange operational behavior and have Spyware Doctor installed, better see if Spyware Doctor is the culprit.