Run-time error '438':

[Bob Denny]

I will look at this. The problem is that Planner is written in VB6 and that development environment won't run on W11 24H2. ACP is also written in VB6 though and it runs fine on W11 24H2. So it's not "VB" that is the problem. Maybe I can see what Planner is trying to do. Just so I have a repro scenario, please reply with a plan that fails to import. It's possible that some directive is triggering the problem and by luck William has plans with that directive. And to be suer it is It will be better if I can reproduce the exact problem. I'll do that and then look at the sources to see if I can guess, then take the exe over to W11. I can insert popups to step through the process. This may take some time but I'll do my best to figure this out.

[William Bristow]

Hi Bob.

Thank’s for looking at this for Bill Martin.

You don’t need any particular plan to generate the crash of Planner and the runtime error.

Open Planner in the Windows 11 24H2 environment with default settings, import the filter names from MaxIm and create a basic plan, 1 frame each of LRGB with 1 minute duration exposures and any valid target coordinates.

Save the plan to your plans folder and close Planner.

Open Planner and verify the plans list pane is empty.

Attempt to import the plan you just saved and Planner will report the runtime error 438 and then Planner will close when the pop-up error box is acknowledged with 'OK'.

I’m away from home this evening ‘till late but if you still need one of my plans to repro the issue I’ll post one when I get back later.

(P.S. I was looking for Windows Common Controls and VB6 component updates for Windows 11 yesterday as part of this problem solving for Bill Martin and only found Microsoft documents suggesting these were not pre-installed, or installable, on Windows 11 24H2, which chimes with your comments above).

William.

[Bob Denny]

Thanks William. I think you may have hit on the problem. ACP installs those common controls as part of its installation. The Planner probably does not. If ACP is not on the system it might not be there. It'll be a bit as I have another deliverable for this week. Do you have ACP installed on the test Windows 11 system? Don't install it just for this :-)

[William Bristow]

Hi Bob.

No luck with that avenue of diagnosis, I'm testing on three different Win 11 24H2 hardware platforms and all three have the full suite of ACP apps installed, the working observatory PC, the 'old' observatory PC which I keep as a backup and a Win 11 (ARM) VM running on a Mac, where I write and test my VB and Java scripts for ACP before deployment to the live observatory PC.

I looked for the Common Controls 'COMCTL32.OCX' and 'MSCOMCTL.OCX' in the SYSWOW64 folder, which were both present on all three machines and are the latest versions according to web links that reference an old MS knowledge base article KB896559, (now obsolete), and ran the regsvr from a CMD prompt on those just to verify that Planner could find them if required, but the problem runtime error '438' still occurs when attempting to import a previously created plan.

A dead end I'm afraid, whatever is triggering the runtime error '438' it isn't the MS Common Controls, unless these are no longer fully compatible with Windows 11 24H2.

William.

[Bob Denny]

Thank you William!! I was about to do the same tests and you beat me to it! I'll keep trying.