Actinic Catalog - Missing File

I had a very strange problem recently with my mate Mark's online shop. We've set the shop up using Actinic Catalog (version 6) and it's a good product for the job and generally it works fine. After returning from holiday and processing the first batch of orders, a message started appearing immediately when downloading orders indicating a file was missing, but not giving a hint as to which one.

Unusually the Internet didn't provide a solution, so it was a case of rolling up the sleeves and investigating.

First job was to set Actinic up on another PC, partially so that Mark could get orders out the door and secondly to confirm the server set up was OK. This worked, so we could concentrate on fixing the PC mark uses for dispatch. It's a relatively new machine running XP Pro, service pack 2 and all the current Windows updates. Taking a cut of the files from the second machine across to the dispatch machine didn't make any difference.

I've used the excellent and free SysInternals tools in the past, so I installed FileMon hoping to discover the missing file. It didn't indicate a missing file but did show access to Internet Explorer's temporary files folder, which did seem a bit odd at the time.

Testing the connection from Actinic indicated a problem connecting to the FTP server. Windows Explorer suffered the same problem. So I tried Internet Explorer and noticed the Work Offline option was ticked. Mark uses Firefox rather than IE, so wouldn't have noticed this. Unticking Work Offline allowed IE to access the FTP site and amazingly Actinic was now accessing the orders on the webserver quite happily.

Last job was to transfer the Access database from the other PC onto the dispatch PC and remove the copy of Actinic.

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