Hello Bill,

> > In my case the MPCORB.DAT file was corrupt. Deleted it and Guide 8 worked
> > fine (without MPC minor planets).
>
> Um. That's rather odd... Guide ought to handle that situation more
> gracefully. Thanks for the bug report. I'll see what I can do.

yesterday evening the same happened to me (my notebook, WIN XP SP2) again. I'll
try to reconstruct the steps I have done:

- Guide 8 (22.10.2010) was running

- I unzipped a new version of MPCORB.DAT because I wanted to observe the near
flyby of 2003UV11 with time inserted video for astrometry (clouds prevented the
observation, but I'll try it again the coming evening)

- Searching for 2003UV11 gives "no minor planet". I'm not sure if I didn't first
searched and then unzipped MPCORB.DAT

- I clicked on "show all asteroids" because it was limited to 200000.

- Then (by clicking on ok) the MFC crash occurred.

So I think this kind of crash has something to do with the "asteroid/comet
option", especially switching the use of MPCORB and show all asteroids. I think
what I shouldn't have done is unzipping a new version of MPCORB.DAT while Guide
is running.

I hope you will find this information useful for further debugging a realy great
piece of software.

Clear skies
Bernd

Bernd Brinkmann

Sternwarte Herne, MPC code A18
Herne, Germany

e-mail: info@...
http://www.sternwarte-herne.de