Hi all,

I apologize for the vague description of this post, however we can't quite identify exactly what the problem is. Here is as much details as I can give

VDF 16.0
Windows Server 2012
Multi-user system, VDF embedded data

On this one particular customer's environment (it doesn't affect all our customers), when he executed a series of steps in our app (Let's call it "MainProgram"), he would then get a bunch of status 4 errors. The status 4 errors happened on either "Find" or "Reread" command.

One of our programmers was able to narrow it down that to the fact that we called "Runprogram Wait" before those errors showed up. We were executing another VDF program (Let's call this program "SideProgram") within the same directory. We have had bad run-ins with "Chain Wait", I thought "Runprogram Wait" might cause similar issue, therefore I changed all the calls to "ShellExecute" instead. That didn't fix the problem. In case it wasn't clear, the status 4 errors happened inside "MainProgram". Also, whenever we do "finds"/"saves", we always to the "clear"/"find"/"reread" sequence.

Then we tried replacing "SideProgram" with a C# dummy program. Afterwards there were no more status 4 errors.

At this point, the conclusion is that when one VDF program (caller) executes another VDF program (callee), the file buffers of the caller might get messed up afterwards.

To workaround all the status 4 errors, we have to close all the VDF files in the "MainProgram" before executing the "SideProgram". After executing the side program, we would re-open all the files. That fixed the problem.

To all the VDF old timers out there, does this situation ring any bell?

Thanks in advance,

Frank Cheng