1752 Network issues: Corrupted PDOXUSRS.NETVERSIONS: All
SUBJECT: PDOXUSRS.NET corrupted
BY: RANDY HAINES
Date: 10 April 2004
First here is a summary of the original issue:
Randomly about 2 times a week, the PDOXUSRS.net file apparently becomes corrupt. Workstations will exhibit the following behavior: If Paradox is already running, most of the time it will stop responding. If a Win98 workstation attempts to start a Paradox app, an illegal operation occurs immediately and the app never displays. If a Win2000 or XP workstation attempts to start a Paradox app, the cursor changes to an hourglass momentarily, then nothing happens.
It turns out, the problem was offline file synchronization that's built into Windows. This feature gets activated automatically when you set the location of the "My Documents" folder to reside on a network drive.
Here's where it gets tricky. If a shortcut to start an application (Paradox) is in the "My Documents" folder, the offline files feature follows that shortcut, and somehow makes files the application uses available offline also.
One of the laptops on the network had this condition. Occasionally the user would disconnect from the network in his office and then reconnect in the conference room. When he reconnected, the offline files synchronization would try synchronize the PDOXUSRS.net file as well as *.db and related files. Ahhhh! Scary!
Solution:
When creating a shared folder on a Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003, you can disable the ability for workstations to create offline copies of the files in the folder. On 2000 see "Sharing" tab - "Caching" button.
On 2003 see "Sharing" tab - "Offline Settings" button.