I have a customer using the Access 97 runtime to support part of their product. Ideally, given the budget to do so, I would have replaced that dinosaur by this point, but that isn’t an option today. I am not the system’s original author, but am attempting to provide ongoing support.
To distribute this to their customers, they bought the Office 97 Developer Edition Tools, and once every few years they go through its Setup Wizard to package a new distribution.
This time, the Setup Wizard appears to reach a point where it wants to do something with AXDIST.EXE, and instead puts up a dialog box saying only “Path not found”. The only reference I’ve located on the web is a tantalizing glimpse of a page from a domain that no longer exists, where Google has purged the cache retaining only the sentence that appears with the search result. It isn’t enough of a hint to help me…
(Edit: Aside from lots of reported issues caused by AXDIST.EXE itself, or installations that are trying to use AXDIST.EXE in some way, that is. Our issue is a problem during the creation of a setup package using the ODE setup wizard. Its own documentation only references AXDIST in one place, and does not contain the text “path not found” at all.)
(Edit 2: Further investigation reveals that AXDIST.EXE itself is not the culprit. Removing that file from the setup wizard’s list caused the wizard to stop on the next file in the list. There does not appear to be any significant differences between the description of the file on which it stopped, and the dozen or so files listed above it that were successfully processed. I’m guessing at this point that the resolution is going to be manually recreating the template from scratch, which would be a lot easier if it weren’t trapped inside a horrible UI and stored in the form of an Access database containing a bunch of undocumented tables.)
My question is this: What mistake did we make this time with the setup wizard, and how can we fix it?
The issue turned out to be related to a feature of the Access run time that was explicitly listed in the setup wizard, but should have been left for the wizard to infer.
My general advice to anyone also stuck with dealing with the wizard would be to go back to the start and review all the settings carefully and methodically.