ASCOM lost track of drivers?

[Robert Brewington]

This is a weird one. I am running Win7, Ascom 5.51. Things have been running fine for awhile, I haven't done any updates (my Internet access is down).

Last night I sit down to run some ACP scripts, and my ASCOM drivers are "gone" (they do not show up in the Chooser lists). A variety of Hubs are still present, but telescope and focuser drivers do not appear. FocusMax shows a number (perhaps 6-8) of blank entries in the front of the list of focusers; none of my actual focusers are listed (Optec and EasyFocus).

The Ascom Profile shows things still present - as far as I can tell everything looks OK.

I ran the Diagnostic tool, got the giant list of messages. Not sure what they are telling me. However, it looks like it is looking in both the Registry and the Profile system for settings. A number of Registry entries are reported as missing, such as "Focusers" and "Telescopes".


One source of confusion - I thought the Registry isn't used any more for this? Everything is supposed to come from the Profile xml setup? Or do things have to appear in both places?

I have a second system running Ascom under XP; same 5.5 version of Ascom (no ACP). The same thing happened on that system. No Focusers or Telescopes.

Anyone experience anything like this? I looked around the Ascom site, didn't find anything like this. Also did not find information about what the Diagnostic tool is reporting or how to interpret its results.

I have recently 1) installed Deep Sky Stacker, and 2) installed PoleAlignMax. Perhaps they have messed up the Ascom stuff? PoleAlignMax might be the more suspicious culprit - I don't see DSS doing anything with Ascom.

I assume I will try and re-install the drivers tonight, maybe they will come back.

Thanks in advance for any clues,
brew

[Bob Denny]

2) installed PoleAlignMax

Yep, that program's installer is evil. The ASCOM developers told the PAM authors about it and I thought they had fixed it. Meanwhile, I hate to ask you to do this, but I have an online appointment in less than an hour and need to eat dinner... Could you post this to the ASCOM Talk forum on Yahoo? Someone will know... and you might be able to find the solution via search.

At a minimum, you might be able to re-run the installers for the drivers you need. That might refresh the data in the ASCOM chooser database. I would not uninstall anything just yet. The corruption from PAM might jhave made things get sick during uninstall...