I had an interesting problem come up this week. I have a customer who has eight restaurants that run Aspect Software on their POS machines. He needed to be able to use remote control software to access each of the stores to remotely print reports.
We used PrinterShare in order to have the reports print on his local printer, instead of at the remote locations. Unfortunately, after running PrinterShare, and then exiting from Aspect, we found that Aspect would hang and could not be reloaded. Even trying to shut down the computer would not work, so we had to press the power button until the computer shut down. Not a good solution.
I received a reply from Aspect Software that helped to solve the conflict between Aspect and PrinterShare.
It turns out that Aspect is a 16-bit application. Since 16-bit applications have to run in the NTVDM (Windows NT Virtual DOS Machine) I was able to locate a setting in the Windows Registry that could be adjusted to ensure that NTVDM would unload itself after Aspect closed.
By default, NTVDM will stay running after it is loaded for the first time. But, if you change the registry setting shown below, it unloads, and the conflict with PrinterShare goes away.
1. Run RegEdit.exe
2. Drill down to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WOW
3. Change DefaultSeparateVDM from “no” to “yes” (without the quotes)
After a reboot of the computer, the problem goes away. I made this change on Windows XP machines and a Windows 7 machine. It worked great on all of them.
Problem solved!
