Hi Roger, Bernd and all,

I think, I resolved the problem with Guide 9.1 crashing when right clicking on one of the star symbols of variable stars to get "more information". In fact, if you fully "zoom in" on ZZ Cam for instance, you will get four star symbols (if you have the latest version of the GCVS, which Bill implemented by ".tdf" and not via the old standard way). One symbol is produced by the GSC 3.2 star catalogue, one by the Hipparchos catalogue, one by the old GCVS (numbered version 4, which you can still find in the Guide subfolder "Variable") and last, but not least, the newest GCVS.

If the newest GVSC (= ".tdf") is installed, Guide crashes when one is clicking - by hazard or intentionally - :
- first, on the symbol stemming from the old GCVS catalogue and then
- second, right-clicking this symbol to obtain more information.

I had already seen, while making my own ".tdf"s, that some Guide users had not given any ending to their ".dat" files, containing the catalogue. (The .tdf system requires two files, the "catalogue = database" and the "tdf file accessing the catalogue). So to be sure, I completely reinstalled Guide 9.1 (I had a backup copy with my additional files in it which i simply copied over) and waited to the very end of the installation before putting in the NEW GCVS files (tdf system). While Guide did deliver correctly the information from the OLD GCVS catalogue until this moment, it did crash after having put in the NEW GCVS.

So ist is clearly the catalogue itself, which is the culprit.

Remembering that I had seen user data sets (.tdf) without having the ".dat" ending, I simply removed the ".dat" ending (including the point) from the NEW "gcvs_cat.dat" file ... and Guide didn't crash anymore. To make it perfectly work (otherwie you would not get the information from the new catalogue "in parallel", it is however further necessary to also change the reference in the first line INSIDE the corresponding .tdf file (= gcvs.tdf), by opening this second file with notepad and deleting the ending). Now you can alternatively have the information from the old GCVS catalogue and from the new one by clicking on the corresponding star symbol (at least in my case = freshly installed Guide 9.1).

Please don't ask me WHY it works !

Rudi