Following a TEC3r lock-up on a customer’s car during a firmware update from WT302T3 to WT305T3 using WinTEC 3.5.6 we sent the unit back to EMI for “unlocking” and then for a hardware/firmware upgrade to enable it to “talk” WinTEC 4.
Before proceeding, we carefully read all the relevant postings in these forums especially the one titled
TEC3 in WinTEC4 Countdown.
We noticed that several people reported having a problem with Error 13 - Type Mismatch popping up when the Splash Screen initialized the Database, but also saw the advice of Jon@EMI to "When the "your version is newer" prompts come up, say No to All”
After attempting to load the WinTEC 4 program labelled 4.8.20 off a small CD that came back with the returned unit we discovered the CD was blank. No big deal - we downloaded the program from
HERE and soon we were “installing away”.
After the installation completed we restarted Windows and sparked up WinTEC4. Sure enough, Error 13 appeared and the program crashed and closed. We uninstalled everything, and did it again, and again and again and again. We tried it all: Saying No to ALL, Yes to ALL, Maybe to Some all to no avail – Wretched Error 13 persisted.
Then we said, “Well it must be an issue with the Windows on this machine, let’s try another machine”. In total, we attempted the install on 9 (Read: NINE) machines (4 desktops, and 5 laptops) with a wide selection of OSs ranging from Vista, XP SP1, SP2, SP3 to Win2K, Win ME and Win 98 with processors from both Intel and AMD and 48MB of RAM to 2GB of RAM - nothing made any difference.
The 10th machine happened to have WinTEC 4.5.25 installed previously and our technician neglected to uninstall it before loading WinTEC 4.8.20 right over it. Guess what – WinTEC 4 started right up and the Error 13 never appeared. We went back to each of the 9 other machines and loaded them first with WinTEC 4.5.25 followed by WinTEC 4.8.20 and they all initialized OK with no errors. About WinTEC screen confirmed we were in fact running 4.8.20.
If I had to make a guess, I’d say the boys at EMI didn’t check off something (or checked off too many squares) in the Visual Basic Deployment/Installation Wizard include file list. I have no doubt that EMI’s testing of 4.8.20 on machines that saw previous VB development work may and could have masked this issue. The only suggestion I would give them is to attempt installation of each new release on machines with a fresh install of Windows (not the one in their cubicle they develop on or some machine with previous WinTEC installations that are either active of uninstalled) and the problem would surely be observed.
Until this is addressed in the next release, we hope that other users who get Error 13 (and I don’t see how they wouldn’t) can benefit from our accidental discovery of a “workaround”.
Cheers,
Rick Marsen
Electrical Engineer
Ottawa, Canada
