Btrieve 6.15 (Win 95) does not autoload in VB 6.0 IDE environment

Question

I've recently bought a new tower and used third-party software to port across all my development tools (another story in itself), including VB 6.0, all my third-party tools, and Btrieve. The only problem I have with Btrieve is more an annoyance than anything. On this new tower, I have to remember to run my compiled application once before attempting to run it from inside the IDE or else it will not load, and subsequently return a corresponding error when it attempts to open the first file.

If anyone else has encountered this and knows how to fix it, I'd much appreciate it.

Answer 1

After checking this page on Wikipedia I realized that I needed to focus on two files: w32mkde.exe and wbtrv32.dll

By manually running the exe file, it would load the engine and my application would then run in the IDE, but I still had to manually start the exe. The desired and original behavior on my older machine was that running my program in the IDE would automatically launch the sever exe. From the Wiki page, I learned that it was wbtrv32.dll that was actually called by the program, which in turn would call the exe if needed.

I had recentl ported over my old machine to a new tower, and many of the ocx and dll files in \windows\syswow64 did not make it. There seems to be no pattern to which ones, but I had to re-register those as I found them. There must be some link there, because when I copied-over the W*.exe and W*.dll files from my production backup folder to the syswow64 folder, it suddenly worked again. Likely just a corrupt copy of the dll file. I believe the reason that the compiled version ran correctly is because those dll and exe files were installed to the application folder, and were apparently okay, but not being invoked when run from the IDE.

Hope this might help someone else some day.