Program Crashes As Soon As Hit Print

[JRIH]

I am using Filemaker Pro 4.0 on Windows XP. It usually works perfectly. But sometimes it crashes (like now) when I tell it to print from the file menu.

I will do a recovery and it will print a couple of times and then start crashing. Unfortunately, this is a work machine and I am stuck with 4.0.

Any help will be appreciated. No problems on my Mac G5.

[Ted S]

Hello JRIH,

Wow, version 4.0. That goes back a long time in Filemaker terms.

The early WINDOWS versions on Filemaker (before v7.0) were very finicky when it came to printers. They essentially became married to the PC's default printer and would crash if it went away or was replaced by something else. Sometimes the crash would happen on printing, sometimes when all you did was simply open the Filemaker application. The heart of the problem is that FM would look for it's expected printer and if it wasn't there it would just crash. It didn't matter that you had replaced the printer with another legitimate printer on the same port, it wanted the exact same printer. The problem went away when v7 came out as I recall.

The crashing could be fixed in two ways:

1. Modify the Windows registry to eliminate all references to the printer that was no longer there.
   
2. Uninstall then reinstall the entire Filemaker application.
   

Be careful if you are going to modify the registry because catastrophic harm can be done to your entire PC if you goof up. Sorry but I can't remember the exact specifics about the registry.