Both 2.2.9 and 2.3.5 on Windows?

[Stephen R. Besch]

Colin Law wrote:
>> On 09/03/2009 08:17 AM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>>     
>>> Quoting Stuart McGraw<smcg4191 at frii.com>:
>>>       
>>>>  I just installed Guncash-2.3.5 (Windows) to play with
>>>>  it a little.  I installed it to a different "Program Files"
>>>>  subdirectory than my existing 2.2.9 installation.  But
>>>>  after it installed, I can no longer start gnucash-2.2.9.
>>>>  When I try, I get an error message box that says,
>>>>  "Unspecified fatal error encountered, exiting", followed
>>>>  by another error message box that says, "Runtime error,
>>>>  ... This application has requested the Runtime to terminate
>>>>  in an unusual way..."  The problem seems to be that both
>>>>  versions of Gnucash seem to use the same USERPROFILE/.gconf/
>>>>  directory and the settings recorded there are not compatible
>>>>  between the two versions.
>>>>
>>>>  Is there some way I can tell the gnucash-2.3.5 install
>>>>  to use a different .gconf directory?  Or some other way
>>>>  to run two Gnucash versions without them stepping on
>>>>  each other?
>>>>         
>>> Sorry, no.
>>>
>>> They use the same registry keys to point to installation location.
>>>       
>> I searched the registry for "gnucash" but saw nothing
>> that seemed relevant to the .gconf directory location.
>> Search for for ".gconf" turned up nothing and search
>> for "gconf" I don't think found anything (not totally
>> sure because I had to skip a billion "logconfig" entries.)
>>
>> Perhaps the .gconf directory location is hardwired in
>> the code?
>>
>> I guess I can just create a different user to test
>> 2.3.5 but it would be a lot more convenient if I didn't
>> have to switch users to try out the new version since
>> comparing reports from each version is part of the
>> testing.
>>     
>
> If the .gnucash dir is the only problem then write two little batch
> files to invoke gnucash.  Make gnucash229.bat copy (in the approprate
> dir) .gnucash229 to .gnucash and run gnucash. Then after gnucash exits
> copy it back again.  Similarly for 235.  I do the equivalent with
> scripts in ubuntu and it works fine.  The only thing I have to
> remember is not to close the later version with a database open (as
> opposed to an xml file) otherwise 229 tries to open the db and does
> not like it.  I presume the last used file info is stored other than
> in .gnucash.  I am not sure whether in windows you have to do
> something special in the batch file to make it wait till gnucash exits
> before doing the copy back command.
>
> On Windows does gnucash put any dlls in the system dirs?  If so have
> any of those changed?  If so then this may also be a problem.
>
> Colin
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>   
If there are version specific dll's in any of the system dirs, this can 
probably be gotten around too. Window's always looks for dll's first in 
the program directory, then in system directories. If it finds one in a 
local directory, it will load that one. Simply copying the version 
specific dll from the system directory into the program directory is 
usually enough to fix this. The only problem is that Windows may not 
unload the dll's in a timely fashion when gnucash exits. This would mean 
that there could be issues when running one version, then the other. If 
it's the only program using the dll, it should unload with the program, 
but you never know.

Steve