Both 2.2.9 and 2.3.5 on Windows?

[Stuart McGraw]

On 09/03/2009 09:01 AM, Stephen R. Besch wrote:
> Derek Atkins wrote:
>>  Hi,
>>
>>  Quoting Stuart McGraw<smcg4191 at frii.com>:
>>
>>>  Hello,
>>>
>>>  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.
>>
>>  It would be nice if we could change that, but right now that's how
>>  it works.
>>
>>>  Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
>>>  You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
>>
>>  -derek
>>
> There is a straightforward way around that using a "registry bomb" to
> change the .gconf directory before GC runs:
>
>      1) Export the registry key that defines the .gconf directory location.
>      2) Put a copy of the ".reg" file in each GC directory.
>      3) Edit one of them to point to a new directory.
>      4) Start GC with a script that loads the ".reg" file first using
> regedit or regedt32.
>
> There is an option to regedit that makes it load the reg file silently,
> so you won't have to "OK" the change each time GC runs.

Actually, when I went back and looked more carefully, I was
mistaken in my earlier post -- I thought the problem was the
contents of .gconf were being changed.  That may or may not
be true but more importantly, as Derek Atkins pointed out,
there is a single set of registry keys in \HKLM\Software\Gnucash\
that point to the "one, true, installed gnucash" and which,
not being qualified by version, gets overwritten whenever
a new version of gnucash is installed.

So I could use your suggestion to replace that entire set
of keys and I think that would work.  My idea of using two
separate user accounts won't since the set of keys is
system-wide.

At this point though, I think I will just continue with
2.2.x until the 2.3 series stabilizes.

I would have thought that being able to run two+ versions
in parallel would be pretty important for testing and
verification when dealing with financial data.
(No criticism implied, just surprise.)