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Access 2003 misbehaves with MS-DOS start command
2008-Nov-18, Tuesday 10:57 pmIn spite of numerous attempts to search at Microsoft.com and Google.com, I've been unsuccessful in thinking of the magic words that would let me find a reference to this particular problem. Might it be an undocumented bug? *gasp*
What I noticed first was that the Access Macro command to Quit would no longer work. "The command or action 'Quit' isn't available now" with run-time error 2046. It gave me a message about the command being unavailable because maybe Access was in read-only mode or maybe the database was an older version and couldn't run the new command. None of it made any sense because it had worked the previous week.
Then I noticed that my VBA modules would run fine if I launched them manually from the Access Macro that called them, but I could not get them to run with the "/x MacroName" parameter in an MS-DOS batch file. Then I noticed that it wasn't just VBA calls... I couldn't get any Macro step of any kind (even a simple MsgBox) to run from a batch file. These things had all worked fine the previous week, and I couldn't find any hints at all online.
So I started experimenting with converting my Access 2000 database to Access 2003, and removing my self-signed digital signature, and changing parameters in the MS-DOS batch file. Eventually I discovered that simply removing the START command from the batch file would make all these problems go away magically. I thought that START was sort of an implied command anyway. I had added it to my batch file as a formality earlier. It called up Access just fine when I tried it out, so I thought it was good.
But Access 2003 dislikes it for some reason, disabling some functionality. Anyone know why?
What I noticed first was that the Access Macro command to Quit would no longer work. "The command or action 'Quit' isn't available now" with run-time error 2046. It gave me a message about the command being unavailable because maybe Access was in read-only mode or maybe the database was an older version and couldn't run the new command. None of it made any sense because it had worked the previous week.
Then I noticed that my VBA modules would run fine if I launched them manually from the Access Macro that called them, but I could not get them to run with the "/x MacroName" parameter in an MS-DOS batch file. Then I noticed that it wasn't just VBA calls... I couldn't get any Macro step of any kind (even a simple MsgBox) to run from a batch file. These things had all worked fine the previous week, and I couldn't find any hints at all online.
So I started experimenting with converting my Access 2000 database to Access 2003, and removing my self-signed digital signature, and changing parameters in the MS-DOS batch file. Eventually I discovered that simply removing the START command from the batch file would make all these problems go away magically. I thought that START was sort of an implied command anyway. I had added it to my batch file as a formality earlier. It called up Access just fine when I tried it out, so I thought it was good.
But Access 2003 dislikes it for some reason, disabling some functionality. Anyone know why?