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May
9th

Download this Program We Built to Fix our Program?

Posted in Technology by User ImageDouglas Karr at 6:12 pm

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Our clients utilize PCAnywhere for their support issues. I’m running Vista - so when I tried to load our licensed client, I was swiftly met with an incompatibility message and the installer quit.

In visiting the Symantec site, they of course fixed the compatibility issue with an upgrade to version 12.1. The snag? You have to pay $100 for the upgrade. I have to have it, so I paid the $100. Paying $100 for an application to simply work after you paid the initial licensing before is really enough to make you angry.

Now that I have 12.1 loaded up, I’m having tons of problems with it. The app appears to be running if I look in Task Manager, but the window is nowhere to be found. And if I do get the window up, it’s totally blank. I started researching the issue in the Symantec forums. One note I found was a great article on the Symantec Autofix program.

What kind of software company writes a program that fixes issues that affect their original program? I guess Symantec would be that company.

Hey Symantec: If you know what the problem is and how to fix it, put the fix in your original application!!!

After installing the Autofix program, PCAnywhere still continues to have issues. I cringe when I have to use any Symantec program… I’ve been writing about them for too long.

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4 Comments »

Comment by no imageEric (SezWho)
2008-05-10 08:59:34

Windows Vista…the beginning of the end for Microsoft?
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Pingback by Workaround for PCAnywhere Bug with Vista | The Marketing Technology Blog
2008-06-07 20:10:35

[...] on this bug, but apparently it’s affecting other users as well. Rather than wait for Symantec to come up with a fix, I figured out that the rendering engine, Winawe32.exe is causing the [...]
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Comment by no imageAbhijit (SezWho)
2008-08-22 05:58:42

If you are getting this consistently, try the following:

- Launch sessioncontroller.exe - you will find this in the program install directory.
- wait a few seconds
- then double click and launch pcAnywhere (winaw32.exe)

The blank screen is due to pcanywhere timing out waiting for sessioncontroller.exe to launch.

This has been fixed in 12.5 - currently in Beta at http://betanew.altiris.com/BetaProducts/PCAnywhere125Enterprise/tabid/148/Default.aspx

-abhijit

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Comment by no imageAnotherCoder (SezWho)
2008-10-22 17:05:49

Ok, great… except that every .5 update (and some of the .1 updates) are a separate product line, requiring an additional purchase. For $200 (even with the $100 “upgrade” rebate), I expect my software product to work, out of the box, with no issues. Immediately. Not after waiting 6 months, or even after waiting for 30mb of updates from their LiveUpdate system… which, interestingly enough, only sees a portion of their installed software. Why doesn’t it update *all* of my Symantec software at once, instead of requiring 7 different LiveUpdate instances for 7 separate products from the same company?

Back to my original gripe… why should I have to pay extra to acquire what should, at the very least, have been a patch released to users of 12.1, nevermind 12.0 (which didn’t work on Vista)?

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