HSW and Vista

Okay, so you need to buy a new computer but no one will sell you one with XP on it. Will Horse Show for Windows work on Vista? Good question.

We've had mixed results with usage of HSW on Vista. We purchased a new machine with Vista for testing (although currently it's in the shop for other issues ;-) and we've listed what we have found so far. Not every user has experienced each of these (which makes it all the more frustrating to find solutions). If you have had other difficulties using HSW on Vista, feel free to comment to this post.

Problem - Installation - depending on the processor in your new Vista machine (and potentially some older machines but less likely), you may get an error when trying to install HSW. As it turns out, the program itself has no problems running on the higher bit processors but the installation program to load it isn't compatible with the higher bit processors.
Solution - we are working on getting either an upgrade to the installation program we have been using for 10 years or a different one; either way, it will be compatible and installation should again run smoothly. If you need something immediately, let us know and we can send you an installation that was generated on a demo that will work but we can't distribute at this point.

Problem - Adding more than one show to the database - this one is a stumper...the database has multiple tables in it...all but the show table are updating correctly. Microsoft says there is no problem. We have upgraded to the newest version of Access to no avail but expect to do more research on this issue with the Access group since the Vista group has been no help.
Solution - you can send us your database with the information on your additional shows and we will add them in ourselves and send back the database to you for continued use. If you have Microsoft Access, we can walk you through the process on your own. Ironically, once you have more than one show in the database through another source, there seems to be no problem adding more in through the program. We will continue to work on this issue until it is resolved to the point of adding all shows through the program.

Problem - connecting horses/people already in the database to new records from the drop down boxes - this is a new one just recently discovered and not yet confirmed that it's a Vista issue as we had seen this in older versions of Windows98 also. Update - looks like this issue is only with the sire and dam information so if you are not tracking those you should be okay...we are continuing our work on this issue.
Solution - at this point, the only thing to do is to add those horses/people to the database multiple times. Once we can duplicate the error and verify the problem, we'll come up with a better solution to keep things rolling properly.