I have been using Filemaker Pro v3 since it was first introduced in 1995.

It does everything I need so I have not felt the need to upgrade. I have

installed it in successive computers under Win 95, Win98 and now WinXP. It

has performed well under all windows versions untill the last few weeks.

It has performed well on my current WinXP machine until recently it has

become very slow to launch - and does not launch at all when Filemaker

database files (with extension *.fp3) are double clicked. It will, however,

launch if a *.fp3 file is right clicked and the 'open with' routine is used.

My WinXP is fully up to date and is stable and reliable, virus protection is

up to date and disk is defragmented.. I have uninstalled and re-installed

FM Pro with no improvement. I have ensured that the 'registered file type'

dialog is correctly set up.

Could it be that a recent update to WinXP has affected its ability to

correctly recognise the file type extension (fp3) of this elderly

application? If so is there a fix?

I would not be at all surprised if this old of an application no longer works. It likely relies on calls to old Windows libraries that may no longer exist or have been changed and no longer work the same.

I think that you'll find that updating to either Filemaker 6 or 7 will be well worth the investment.

Is your database made up of many files or is it just the one .fp3 file?

I ask because when I upgraded from a network of mainly win98, to win2000/xp using filemaker 4, I got awful performance.

Resetting all the links between files sorted it - and the quickest way to do that is open the solution as the host and set all the files to single user. Close the solution down. Open the solution, and make all the files multi-user again.

Just a suggestion but I seem to remember that solving a problem for one of my clients once.

It is just a single FP3 file. It is the launching of the application and the opening of the file which takes a long time (up to one minute). During this period there is a lot of disk activity as if parts of the application have to be retrieved from many different physical locations on the disk.

Once the file is open it works normally.

Try deleting all files in your temp folder.

Bueno!!! That did the trick, thank you very much!