Hi All,

I thought I would document this for future reference.....

Although we do not actually use Paradox for Windows, one of our Clients does 
for another application.

Things have been fine at that site for over 5 years, but they just had a new 
machine installed running Windows 10.

This machine is a shared workstation used by two part-time workers in a job 
share scenario - they have their own Windows Logins.

Anyway, our application runs perfectly fine without any problems, but since 
installation the Paradox application does not work correctly giving all 
sorts of random BDE errors. Their IT person was clueless and so they asked 
us to have a look.

What we found is sort of interesting, one User account was running Paradox 
elevated and the other was not. Our application always runs unelevated (as 
it should).

As you probably guessed the issue is related to permissions, plus poor 
application design. So the first problem is that the Paradox Application's 
PRIV location is not private per user but private to the workstation. 
Perfectly fine for a one person machine and possibly fine in this case as 
well were it not for one of them running it elevated.

Essentially, when the lck files in the PRIV directory get created, they get 
the permissions of the current user. If these files do not get deleted when 
Paradox exits, and the other User runs Paradox, they get a BDE error because 
they do not have the correct permissions to access the lck files. Delete the 
lck files manually and the problem goes away.

But then we saw another problem, and this time it was to do with our 
application running (unelevated) in parallel with Paradox (elevated). The 
same permissions problem occurs with the default net file - the one in 
C:\BDE32\NetDir (in our case).

Obviously the solution was to stop running Paradox elevated - we knew it 
worked unelevated because the other account did. But we simply could not get 
it working under this particular user account. So we created a new user 
account and sure enough it ran unelevated there as well. So we transferred 
everything over and deleted the original User account.

The only thing that was different about the User account that forced Paradox 
elevated was that this was the account that originally installed the Paradox 
application. But we had no time to investigate any further because as usual 
once it is working the Client does not care once the problem goes away. Time 
is money etc etc etc


So as I pondered about this theoretically in another thread somewhere, we 
now have real world proof........ Running Paradox for Windows elevated is 
not good at all when it is in a shared environment, i.e. other BDE or 
Paradox applications or even User accounts.

All effort must be made to ensure that Paradox for Windows runs *** 
unelevated *** so that you do not run into weird permissions issues down the 
track which can bring other applications screaming to a halt. Or to put it 
another way, if you are having to run Paradox For Windows elevated, you have 
problem which may or may not bite you later on.

FWIW
Leslie.