No Simulations found

[NEC]

I have just started to have a problem when running up Coco 2 getting a message "Could not find the Default Simulation" and then zero simulations found.
We hve been running successfully for the last few years and this problem has only just appeared, it is on a number of PC's and only shows up when running the program with a limited or standard user; when running with an administrator user the problem does not occur.

The PC's are running Coco2 version 1.2.5.40 with Simulation Pack 1, on Windows XP Pro service pack 2 and uptodate patches.

We have a number of other PC's running XP SP2 that do not have this problem, but not with an identical build and combination of programs. I have tried uninstalling and re-installing but to no effect.

My assumption is that another program must have changed the permissions of a shared component, but unfortunatley as we only run Coco at this time of year I do not know what the program might be.

Any ideas of where to start looking would be gratefully received.

Thank you

[steve]

We have seen this problem with one other user and the cause seemed to be a piece of software called "Vision6". Here's what this user told me:

If I uninstall the vision 6 s/w all is well and all the simulations appear in the list. If I reinstall vision 6 it fails.

Unfortunately, I was unable to get in contact with the makers of this Vision6 software, so I could not resolve this totally.

Do you use this software on the problematic PCs?

[NEC]

Unfortunately not, but I can get around it by setting the program shortcut to run as an administrator, so I guess it might be a permissions problem with a shared windows program. I have seen that before with other programs.

Are there any that Coco relies upon that I could look at?

Thanks

[steve]

There could be an issue with the permissions in the HKCR section of the registry (this is where CoCo retrieves the list of simulations). Specifically, the info for each simulation is in the "CLSID" hive and the "Component Categories" hive is used to retrieve the "category" information that determines the available simulations.

I have also seen this issue before which was caused by a corrupt entry within the "CLSID" hive of the registry (this entry was not to do with our program at all, but it seemed to prevent the processing of the category information within the "CLSID" hive). But this seems unlikely in your case because it is occuring on multiple PCs.

[steve]

I tackled this with "NEC" via email and the problem has now been solved. It was due to some corrupt registry keys that had permissions set so that normal users could not read the keys.

Here is the final resolution to this problem, in NEC's own words:

After checking through all the relevant keys in the registry I found one without User read permissions, this related to Flash Player, I added User read permissions and that solved the problem.

The key was:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{1171A62F-05D2-11D1-83FC-00A0C9089C5A}]
@="FlashProp Class"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{1171A62F-05D2-11D1-83FC-00A0C9089C5A}\InprocServer32]
@="C:\\WINDOWS\\system32\\Macromed\\Flash\\Flash9.ocx"
"ThreadingModel"="Apartment"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{1171A62F-05D2-11D1-83FC-00A0C9089C5A}\Programmable]

I then tried to get around it without having to change the registry manually by uninstalling and reinstalling Flash Player, this did not remove the key or change any permissions.

Eventually by pure chance I found out that you cannot uninstall flash player properly by windows add/remove programs in the control panel, but must now use an uninstall program from adobe.
Running that does remove the key which is no longer used, so reinstalling causes no problems.