Covetrus AviMark Cannot Locate Microsoft Word Installation
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We have lots of clients seeing this, and we know other service providers with AviMark customers seeing this: current AviMark seems to be unable to reliably work with MS Word. For normal software, this would not be an issue, but MS Word is a required component of Covetrus AviMark for cert portions of their printing system. So it's absolutely critical and just part of an AviMark installation.
We are now regularly seeing that AviMark is unable to recognize that Word is installed. It just throws an error saying that you don't have Word. We can verify that Word is installed, registered, working properly, licensed, signed in, etc. AviMark has provided some registry hacks to try to get this to work, but they do nothing. We can reproduce this easily and have done so for AviMark as have other service providers. AviMark claims that it can't be reproduced, which is BS since we have been reproducing it for them anytime that they want.
Microsoft has published that how AviMark is trying to use Word isn't supported and won't work. So this isn't a vendor's pointing fingers kind of thing, MS is not in the picture at all. AviMark is 100% responsible for making Word attempt to do something that is outside of its specs.
AviMark seems to regularly stall by telling us that we need to reinstall Word. Which we do, following their directions, over and over, but obviously it does nothing. At this point AviMark is just broken, and someone high in management finally admitted this, but in the coding and support ranks, it seems that AviMark is just ignoring this. Some theorize that it is intentionally being left broken to push people to their other products, but why would anyone stay with a vendor that makes broken software intentionally and doesn't provide the support that people are paying for?
Anyone found a work around to AviMark's bug?
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How is the software using Word? COM object? VBA?
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@Pete-S said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Location Microsoft Word Installation:
How is the software using Word? COM object? VBA?
COM object.
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@scottalanmiller said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Location Microsoft Word Installation:
@Pete-S said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Location Microsoft Word Installation:
How is the software using Word? COM object? VBA?
COM object.
Very sensitive to permissions.
Do you have the skills in house to try and automate something with a simple program?
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I'd check what language AviMark is done in. Probably C#.
Make a small automation test using Words object model with the same language that AviMark uses and run it under the same user and permissions as the AviMark software.
That should give tell you some valuable things.
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@Pete-S said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Location Microsoft Word Installation:
I'd check what language AviMark is done in. Probably C#.
Pascal
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It's ghost ship software from the 1990s.
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@scottalanmiller said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Location Microsoft Word Installation:
It's ghost ship software from the 1990s.
Doesn't really matter if you want it to work.
Pascal, that should be Delphi then. Doesn't matter either in this case because COM api has nothing to do with .NET. But Delphi produces real compiled exe files like C++ so it has full access to all windows APIs.
Unfortunately I've forgotten most things about COM objects, OLE automation and ActiveX.
What I do remember is that you go by the CLSid to invoke the COM object. Since the error is that it can't find the application it's either the wrong CLSid (registry related) or the wrong permissions/security settings.
When you troubleshoot COM automation you usually run the automated application with desktop interaction so you can see what happens. Not an option here though but it doesn't really matter because you don't get that far.
That's why you need to write a small program that invokes Word because if you can't, then your installation is the problem, not the AviMark application.
But you haven't provided much info in this thread (screenshots, versions, registry settings etc) so I guess you're not really trying to solve the problem, you just want to bitch about it.
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@Pete-S said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Location Microsoft Word Installation:
Doesn't really matter if you want it to work.
Point was it wasn't some modern tool like C#
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@Pete-S said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Location Microsoft Word Installation:
But you haven't provided much info in this thread (screenshots, versions, registry settings etc) so I guess you're not really trying to solve the problem, you just want to bitch about it.
Well, it's a code issue that the vendor has to solve. They are aware of it and we are tracking it, but they aren't fixing the code. They know that it is broken, and they know that they need to solve it. And their customers are paying them to provide the fix.
If we do any fixes like this and there are issues, AviMark will blame us. So it's a bit outside of what we can do to try to fix a problem that isn't ours to fix. AviMark says we have to fix it by just reinstalling Word. Which they know doesn't work, but it's an attempt to get out of providing support.
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@Pete-S said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Location Microsoft Word Installation:
Make a small automation test using Words object model with the same language that AviMark uses and run it under the same user and permissions as the AviMark software.
But we don't have access to that language. Delphi is a paid product that we don't have. We are the customer's IT support, not a development shop making AviMark.
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@Pete-S said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Location Microsoft Word Installation:
Unfortunately I've forgotten most things about COM objects, OLE automation and ActiveX.
What I do remember is that you go by the CLSid to invoke the COM object. Since the error is that it can't find the application it's either the wrong CLSid (registry related) or the wrong permissions/security settings.
When you troubleshoot COM automation you usually run the automated application with desktop interaction so you can see what happens. Not an option here though but it doesn't really matter because you don't get that far.Well, but according to Microsoft, the call that they are using is not supposed to work. So you see the problem. It's not like there is a COM call to fix, the issue is making the COM call in the first place. It's documented, specifically because some vendors were doing this, that this approach cannot work because it is based on how Word worked (intentionally or incidentally) long ago, but not any longer.
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@Pete-S said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Location Microsoft Word Installation:
But you haven't provided much info in this thread (screenshots, versions, registry settings etc) so I guess you're not really trying to solve the problem, you just want to bitch about it.
What would we provide? AviMark throws the error, and it just acts like Word isn't installed, and we know it is because AviMark is calling it incorrectly and reports incorrectly. There is no error code or anything of the sort, and the error is wrong anyway, because it is a bug / design flaw in the application reporting the false information.
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Hey, managed to get a screenshot when I ran into it again today.
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@scottalanmiller Creating a clean new user profile has been working on some of the machines.
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@Romo said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Locate Microsoft Word Installation:
@scottalanmiller Creating a clean new user profile has been working on some of the machines.
Great find! Thanks.
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@scottalanmiller said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Locate Microsoft Word Installation:
@Romo said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Locate Microsoft Word Installation:
@scottalanmiller Creating a clean new user profile has been working on some of the machines.
Great find! Thanks.
It's strange that AviMark started to work just when you created a new user profile. What are the odds of that? They must have RDP'd into the customers system and recompiled their application. That must be it. I bet it didn't have anything do with the registry settings, as I would have imagined. Well, live and learn.
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@Pete-S said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Locate Microsoft Word Installation:
@scottalanmiller said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Locate Microsoft Word Installation:
@Romo said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Locate Microsoft Word Installation:
@scottalanmiller Creating a clean new user profile has been working on some of the machines.
Great find! Thanks.
It's strange that AviMark started to work just when you created a new user profile. What are the odds of that? They must have RDP'd into the customers system and recompiled their application. That must be it. I bet it didn't have anything do with the registry settings, as I would have imagined. Well, live and learn.
Well part of the problem is keeping it working, not just getting it to work. In this case, it's new installs. But with most cases in the past, it's existing installs that just stop working. According to Microsoft, it's flaky. It can work sometimes, but there is no guarantee or expectation of it to keep working.
Now maybe there is a registry setting that we can force that keeps it working. But officially, according to MS, there shouldn't be.
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@scottalanmiller said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Locate Microsoft Word Installation:
It's ghost ship software from the 1990s.
Pascal!!??? Wow... Hop in the way back machine. 1985, Apple IIe, computer math 2, sophomore in high school. We have come a looooooooong way.
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@popester said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Locate Microsoft Word Installation:
@scottalanmiller said in Covetrus AviMark Cannot Locate Microsoft Word Installation:
It's ghost ship software from the 1990s.
Pascal!!??? Wow... Hop in the way back machine. 1985, Apple IIe, computer math 2, sophomore in high school. We have come a looooooooong way.
I was a manager for the Pascal team at GMI in 1994!
