Windows XP help - Cannot Print with Schedule+

David E. Ross wrote:

Windows 7
Schedule+ 7.0a

I have SCHDPL32.EXE in [C:\Schedule]. In that same folder I have 8 .fmt
files including NORMAL.FMT. In my registry, I have
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Schedule+\Ap plication]
"LocalPrintFileDir"="C:\\Schedule"

Schedule+ works okay for me except for printing. When I attempt to
print a day, week, or month, I get an error popup that says
The print operation could not be completed. Cannot print because
there are no valid .FMT files available.

It has been a long time since I tried to print, but I think it was
successful then. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Are you sure the program will append a backslash to the path specified
in the registry before concatentating the filename to the string?

If:
regPath = C:\Schedule
filename = normal.fmt

then:

regPath + "\" filename = C:\Schedule\normal.fmt (valid path)
regpath + filename = C:\Schedulenormal.ftm (invalid path)

But if:

regPath = C:\Schedule\
filename = normal.fmt

then:

regPath + "\" filename = C:\Schedule\\normal.fmt (invalid path)
regpath + filename = C:\Schedule\normal.fmt (valid path)

So what value you specify as the null-terminated (REG_SZ) string for a
data item's value depends on how the program will concatenate the string
with another string.

Did you try appending a backslash to the registry value to see if that
works? Instead of:

"LocalPrintFileDir"="C:\\Schedule"

you might need to specify:

"LocalPrintFileDir"="C:\\Schedule\\"

I have never used Schedule+ even back when I could get it free back in
Windows 95 (actually it first became available back in Windows 3.1).
I'm just guessing that it is possibly a string concatenation problem
where the code in the program might not add a backslash between progdir
and filename.

I saw a 20-year old article mentioning that doing a COMPACT install of
Schedule+ has it reuse the .fmt files in from the MS Exchange (client)
installation. So putting the files in C:\Schedule where you installed
the program may not work to find .fmt files there if the program is
configured to reuse .fmt files from the MS Exchange client. I don't
have (and never had) Schedule+ installed to know what are all its
registry entries. Might another one tell Schedule+ to use its own .fmt
files or reuse those in the MS Exchange client? All that is too old for
me to know if perhaps Schedule+ looks for registry entries for MS
Exchange to know where to find its files instead of having registry
entries directly targeting Schedule+ paths. That is, it might check if
MS Exchange is installed and use its registry keys to find files that
are reused by Schedule+.

I've seen users report the same problem not finding .fmt files by
Schedule+. They changed the install order. They reinstalled MS
Exchange so its install order was after the install of Schedule+.
However, you cannot install the MS Exchange client in your OS where you
merely copied over folders and files for Schedule+. Since you merely
copied over files, do you know for sure that you did not originally
perform a COMPACT install of it?