Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Breaks Lacerte 2008?

When starting Lacerte 2008 this morning, this is what the user would see:

Now, this particular network is a homogeneous SBS 2008 and Windows Vista network.

Since we deliver a restricted domain user account to all of the Windows Vista workstation’s local Administrators Group by Group Policy Preferences, we are able to use Run As Administrator on the shortcut for Lacerte 2008 while logged in as a Standard User.

When we do, we received the following error:

Click on the OK button, and try and navigate to the UNC:

 

When we tried that either running as the user account or via the Run As Administrator account we would receive the same error.

Logging for dropped packets is enabled on all workstations for all three firewall profiles. The Windows Firewall with Advanced Security log showed no dropped packets when trying to run Lacerte 2008.

Since every user was experiencing the same thing, either one of three things has happened:

1. A change was made at the server since all of their Lacerte data resides on it.
2. A change was made at the workstation.
3. A change was made in the program itself.

Since we manage this particular server, we know that there were no changes made between yesterday and today as Lacerte 2008 ran fine yesterday.

When asked about whether Lacerte 2008 took any updates yesterday, the users indicated that none were applied.

That left the workstation:

The Windows Vista Service Pack 2 was installed via WSUS delivery last night.

After troubleshooting the setup on an available workstation, we rebooted the workstation to make sure that any changes made by the service pack were not causing any problems.

Once the workstation came back up, Lacerte 2008 started up just fine.

Something in the WSUS delivered Windows Vista Service Pack 2 did not take properly, or the system did not reboot itself as necessary once the update was applied.

We have a batch file on the server’s desktop with the following content for each workstation on the domain:

• shutdown –r –t 90 –f –m \\MI-Workstation01
• shutdown –r –t 90 –f –m \\MI-Workstation02
• etc…

We made sure to warn them ahead of time via a phone call to the office administrator that we were initiating a reboot of all workstations on the domain.

Once all of the workstations had rebooted, they all had their Lacerte 2008 back.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer