"Daniel Rail" <daniel@...> wrote in message
news:5.1.0.14.2.20020408090513.03eaa190@......

> Helen and Claudio,
>
> Thanks for your patience.
>
> I did find the problem and it wasn't obvious. It was a few files in the
> Firebird directory that was causing the problem. The files were composed
> of the computer name and the extensions .evn and .lck. As soon as I
> deleted these files everything was working fine. I looked on my client
> system which had FB 0.9.4 installed and had similar files. I have no
> viruses on my systems, they were checked yesterday and came clean.

Like this?
F:\BD\Borland\InterBase\ATENEA.lck
protected internally by
\BaseNamedObjects\ATENEA.lck_mutex
in one of the NT namespaces.

The LCK is the locks file. The EVN is the events file. You can inspect the
lck with iblockpr utility. It seems that there's no way to inspect the
events file in an understandable way. This file usually is 32K in lenth.
When the engine closes all dbs, it's reset to nulls or some controls
characters. When the engine is using at least one db, you can say that it
contains some visible characters.

> Like I
> said the problems started immediately after installing FB 1.0 and the only
> applications that weren't able to make a TCP/IP connection were related to
> IB/FB, all other TCP/IP connections were working fine and with the same
> server I was trying to connect to.

Nobody has changed the format of those files AFAIK. Maybe the new user
chosen to run IB couldn't delete or modify those files. Anyway, when you
uninstall, it's always good idea to go and delete all files the uninstaller
didn't remove, including the main app directory itself. This way a new
install will be fresh. If you have users, you can backup isc4 before
uninstalling, restoring it after installing, shutdown the engine, replace
with it the default isc4 and restart the engine.

> If those .evn and .lck files are created by Firebird, given a certain
> circumstance, then I think it would be wise to add this to a FAQ(or other
> documentation) for future reference.

I never have seen that they cause problems between upgrades. Maybe the
engine had crashed thus it didn't zero those files on exit (at least the LCK
isn't deleted but cleaned). Maybe you ran into a file system permission
issue when you upgraded.

C.
--
Claudio Valderrama C. - http://www.cvalde.com - http://www.firebirdSql.org
Independent developer
Owner of the Interbase® WebRing