Hi everyone. I'm having a problem that has been frustrating the heck out of me. I have a database I wrote that consistently and repeatedly crashes when running under Windows 98 (program performed an illegal operation and will be shut down...). It really appears to be a bug in Filemaker, especially considering that I've tried it on several different Windows machines, and it crashes on all of them. When I use the database on a Mac, everything works fine.

We're also having problems with Filemaker Server on a Mac getting its files corrupted pretty much weekly. We've tried swappin machines, and no luck. Hopefully these problems are also caused by Windows clients connecting to the database and crashing, which may be corrupting the files on the server.

I just spend the last 2 solid days trying to reduce the situation to a specific problem area. It seems that a memory leak may be involved, since under different situations, the crash appears at different specific times (but always eventually happens).

Unfortunately, the database is quite large and complicated (with lots of portals, related fields that are calculated values using other related values, etc.) so it's been difficult to simplify things and still have it crash. It seems that the simpler we make the database, the less frequently crashes occur, but we've been unable to come up with a specific field or calculation causing the problem.

I don't know where to go from here - has anyone encountered some sort of similar behaviour on FileMaker 4.1v3 for Windows? We'd consider upgrading to FileMaker 5.0 if we knew that would fix the problem, but we've been unable to confirm if it would.

Thanks for any help or insight you might be able to provide.

Jeannie

When you designed the database was it planned from day 1 to be multiuser, or has it just sort-of developed that way?

I ask because some functions and script steps like import work well in a simgle-user environment, but don't work well in multiuser.

Check to see if some particular scripts are causing the problem.

This database has been a mulituser database for three years now. However, it has evolved dramatically over those three years into a interrelationship of 10 databases. For the first two years the entire system ran without any complications.

On September 19th we experienced our first crash with one particular layout causing most of our concern. When one of our admin support people does a daily search for a checkbox flag in a portal she will ultimately (within a couple of mouse clicks or when she goes to change to another layout or database) receive an Illegal Operation and her client will quit.

I believe all the scripts are multiuser friendly. I do not use any importing scripts currently in the database.

I checked that database with FileMaker 5.0 for windows last night and received the same errors.

My database has been stable until after my return from my first Devcon in Palm Desert in September.

I think I am going to have to rebuild this structure from scratch, but I want to make sure this is the only option before I take a week of my life to sit down and re-create the database from scratch.

Instead of checking the checkbox in a portal, my not make a script thatgoes to the related records and performs the find directly in the related database. That might be a work-around.