For the last two years some Time Clock MTS users have experienced a crash when starting up Time Clock MTS. The error message Windows gave was a rather unhelpful “Time Clock MTS has stopped working”. And that was it. The perplexing thing was that Time Clock MTS would work for months and years on a computer, and then one day it would just stop, and users would be presented with the mysterious message. And nothing they (or we) tried could ever get it working again.
We’ve spend hundreds of hours trying to get to the bottom of the issue with no luck. Mainly because we’ve never been able to reproduce the issue on one of our own computers. But yesterday, a long time user of Time Clock MTS experienced the problem and made his computer available to us via remote connection. After spending the whole day working on his computer we identified the cause of the issue and put a fix in place. Thank goodness! Our thanks must go out to Jose Moldes of International Taxes Inc. of Florida for his time, patience, and for making his computer available to us. I don’t think the problem would have been solved otherwise.
Here are all of the changes made in this release:
- Fix to start up crash seen on some computers. The issue was the text labels on the time clock and keypad screens. These have been replaced and the bug seems to be resolved.
- Fix to various screen elements not re-painting correctly.
- Removed an API call to repaint various window elements because it was surplus to requirements.
- Reworked much of the start up code to prevent needless multiple screen redraws.
Needless to say if you’re experiencing a start up crash of Time Clock MTS this update is a required one.
