Hi Bill,

Thanks for the input and thoughts much appreciated. I have on
occasion forgot to put the CD in the drive and did get the polite
message reminding me, but this wasn't the case this time.

It would seem that I have somehow screwed up the STARTUP.MAR file,
but I haven't a clue as to how since I hadn't changed anything. I had
a copy of that file stuck in another folder and when I re-installed
Guide8 I simply copied that file and replaced the original from the
CD and the same thing happened with a second file. I had run Guide
just Tuesday as I had updated comet and asteroid data from the
Harvard site.

I'm sure that it must be something I did, I just don't know what it
could have been. I know have a second copy of the original
STARTUP.MAR file stuffed away for safe keeping so if I should do this
again I'll know where to get a quick fix.

Many thanks!

Clear, Dark Skies!

Dave

--- In guide-user@yahoogroups.com, Bill J Gray <pluto@p...> wrote:
> Hi Dave, Ketil,
>
> Yikes! People _do_ occasionally get into problems that require
> uninstalling, then re-installing Guide. But none of them (as far
> as I know) have required re-installing Windows.
>
> That _is_ regrettably necessary, sometimes, with other
> software. Something will happen to corrupt the system registry or
> to replace DLLs with a newer or older version, leading to "DLL
> hell". Guide doesn't do much with the system registry or system
> files, so it's relatively immune from such oddities.
>
> Dave, a couple of things to check before uninstalling or
> reinstalling things: first, make sure the first Guide CD is in
> the CD drive. If you run Guide with nothing installed to the hard
> drive, and without a Guide CD in the CD drive, you are supposed
> to get a polite message telling you that Guide needs a CD. But
> some people have found that this doesn't happen. (I still haven't
> figured out how!)
>
> Also, you should probably grab the current version of the
> software:
>
> http://www.projectpluto.com/update8.htm
>
> I would recommend doing this anyway, even if Guide were working
> perfectly, because a _lot_ of interesting things have been added
> to the updates. But it's also common for "strange, unreproducible
> bugs" to vanish when an update is applied. Sometimes a corrupted
> file is replaced by one from the update. Other times, a bug
> present in the original software got fixed at some point in the new
> software.
>
> -- Bill