Intermittent Generic Error Messages causing a Major Inconvenience

[jonesda]

Hi,

I am absolutely puzzeled with a problem we are having with an Ms Access 2000 application, which is the front end to a SQL Server database. We have a database which was working fine for over 6 months. And now all of sudden users are intermittently getting the error messages:

"Error Executing this command"
AND
"You cancelled the previous operation."

I removed the error handling code from the application to get more detailed error messages and we got the following error message:


The expression On Click you entered as the event property setting produced the following error: .

The expression may not result in the name of a macro, the name of a user-defined function, or [Event Procedure].

There may have been an error evaluating the function, event, or macro.


This is only intermittent and when they close the database and open it again it works fine for a little while and then the error occurs again. As you can imagine this is a major inconvenience for users.

I have searched the web and forums and there just seems to be 101 reasons why this could happen. Nothing has changed on our system which might cause this occur so I don't know why this is happening.

Could anybody provide any ideas on how I might go about trouble shooting it. We are thinking of opening a support call with Microsoft but the error messages are so generic that I'm not sure what help they could be.

Any help / ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks

 

[KenHigg]

Can you isolate it to 1 form?

 

[selenau837]

I'm going to ask the obvious question. Have you compacted and repaired it?

Do you have back up copies? Have you tried importing the form from an older version to see if you get the same thing??

 

[The_Doc_Man]

If the expression being referenced (or function) generates a string result, the name of the string might inadvertantly be referencing a named object in the DB. Do you ever attempt to dynamically generate a destination? If you do, the first thing I would look at is any code that tries to name a target label for GOTO or GOSUB operations. The next thing would be something that might try to dynamically redirect any Event destination.

HOWEVER... funky behavior is ALSO possible if you have a missing reference.

Search this forum for "Missing Reference" and you'll see a barge-load of instructions on fixing same. Often, the cause isn't anything related to Access but some obscure package that stepped on the registry at just the wrong time and place during its installation.

Any automatic Windows Update operation could do it, too, because Windows Update includes Office Update. An automated update could affect Access (and other) references almost invisibly. After Service Pack 2 of WinXP, I believe automatic updating is turned on. (I could be wrong about that...)

 

[jonesda]

Hi,

Many Thanks for all the responses

To answer your questions:
- We can't isolate it to one form. It seems to occur throughout the application.
- I gave the users access to a new version of the mde file last Friday with the error handling code removed. The error occurred again with that.
- I'm not sure what dynamically generating a destination means. The code is quite simple for the application. Basically just a switchboard linked to forms to
retrieve data from the SQL Server database. This is done by building a query and setting the recordsource of a form equal to this query. We also update records in the database. Just select and update statements.

I came across the Missing Reference suggestion before. I opened the application on my machine (where the error also sometimes occurs) and there wasn't any reference missing.

Just wondering does anyone know ... when I upsize a database from MS Access to SQL Server (=> MS Access front end to SQL Server Database) and then make the mde file available on the network. When a user runs a query .. does it have a persistent connection to the database? Would any network glitches or disk issues cause the above issue to occur?

Once again .. many thanks for your suggestions.