Version 9 - 10/05/2006 MR

[Zephyr]

A Maintenenace Release dated 10-5-2006 for v9 is now available. Here are the release notes.

ISSUES CORRECTED IN THIS MAINTENANCE RELEASE
Here are some of the issues that have been changed or corrected in this Maintenance Release. Since it has been almost eleven months since the last Maintenance Release, this list is a little longer than usual.

The Canadian Payments Association recently published new specifications regarding Canadian checks. Because of these changes, new check layouts have been added for Canadian users.

If you deleted all of the tax tables defined in Payroll and then attempted to add another, you would get a "record out of range" error when you clicked Add or Save.

Under certain circumstances, printing labels from Contributions for selected contributors could take a long time to process.

When exporting an Account Activity report in Excel format, the debits and credits would appear in the same column.

When inserting an image within an HTML formatted e-mail message, an error could occur if the image was located in a folder containing a space or apostrophe in the name or path.

A problem would occur with the amounts appearing on the 1099-MISC form for a vendor if that vendor had an ID that was less than six characters and those characters matched the beginning of another vendor ID.

The Canada Revenue Agency web site address appearing at the bottom of tax receipts was being redirected to a different address. The tax receipts have been changed to the new web site address and now include an option for changing the address in case it changes in the future.

If you print a check for someone in Payroll and later void it and there is nothing else for that employee, you would get a W2 with zero amounts for them.

If you ran the Selected Contributors report in Contributions just for envelope number 99999, those contributions would not appear. They would appear if you ran the report for a range of envelopes that included 99999, however.

A "record out of range" error could occur when filtering events under the View Accounting Audit Log.

An individual with access only rights in Fund Accounting was not able to view account details or budgets.

When creating a new restriction through the Maintain Donor Restrictions screen, the program would not enter the equity account number correctly if you used an existing income account. The fund number was not being included, so an equity account number of 01-3001-000 would appear as 30-0100-0 and this would cause problems on reports that include equity amounts.

The program would allow you to reassign envelope number 99999 to a different number.

The default role for an attendee was not being added to their record when they were added to an activity on the fly through the Fast Data Entry screen.

The program would allow you to delete an equity account, even if there were accounts set to close to it.

When processing a manual check in Payroll, it was possible to uncheck the "print check" box, clear the date and then post in both Payroll and Fund Accounting without a date.

If you had spaces inserted before or after the ID for a vendor, you could not print a 1099-MISC for that vendor.

You would get an error in Accounts Payable if you tried to void a check that had zeros before the check number.

Under certain circumstances during the Edit & Finish Accounting Setup process, adding an account could generate an error and then the user would be unable to get out of the process without closing the program from within Windows.

Locate screens would occasionally return a record other than the one the user selected.

Closing Version 9 by going to File/Exit or by clicking the "X" in the upper right-hand corner while in the Edit & Finish Accounting Setup process would not save your work, even if you clicked Yes to the prompt to save.

[BrianShoe]

There's a security-related issue with the most recent maintenance release. I've managed to overcome the issue, but I'm reporting it here so you'll be able to alert other users.

Our environment is Windows XP Professional, that we keep up to date. I am extremely careful to make sure all our normal users are "limited" users under Windows XP; I only log in as administrator when it's necessary to fix something or install software.

I just updated PowerChurch (logged in as admin), then logged out and back in as my normal, limited user. On opening PCPlus the first time, after entering my login credentials I got the error:

Error :updatedatadict_replace Cannot update the cursor QM_DICT, since it is read-only.

I couldn't cancel or acknowledge this error; I had to use the Task Manager to kill PowerChurch.

To prevent the error from recurring, I had to log back in as administrator, open and log in to PowerChurch (which succeeded), and exit PowerChurch. Apparently, your update requires something to be modified on first opening the program, that only someone with administrator rights can access. (Note: I also opened the properties dialog for all the directories at C:\PowerChurch and below, and made sure the "Read-Only" bit was unset - could be related.)

This gets back to a standing complaint I have about how PowerChurch installs and what directory structure it presumes. Because many routines within the app assume that all the data files will be in the same directory structure as the program - AND because, in Windows operating systems as of Win2000 and later, all programs are installed in C:\Programs (where "limited" users don't have write/delete privileges), **YOUR** program has to be installed in a special directory all its own, off the root, and privileges to that directory have to be opened up by the administrator (normally, whoever creates the directory "owns" it, and no one else).

In other words, in trying to keep your program compatible with old Windows 95 and Windows 98 operating systems, you've made it incredibly treacherous to install in a modern operating system!! And please don't respond that the user should be logging in with administrator privileges - that's the worst breach of security. (Just look at most Windows updates from the past year - an intruder will have the same level of privileges as the logged-in user - if you need to be convinced.)

I hope this information will be useful to other PCPlus administrators that run into this error when they install the 5-Oct-2006 maintenance release.

[Zorak]

To my knowledge, there was no change to the required privileges in the latest maintenance release. You must at least have rights to *change* files on the computer. As you have seen, even logging in to PowerChurch updates a field in the database with the last login date of the user. The exception is System Admin, for which we don't track a last login date.

This is an issue with PowerChurch going back to the beginning of the new security policies in Win 2000 and XP.

http://powerchurch.com/support/answers/ ... icle_id=41

This is a document that has been in the Knowledge Base for a while. It should get you fixed up.

[Zorak]

Also, at the time you are first installing PowerChurch Plus from the CD, you are prompted for an installation directory. If the problem that you are having is due to PowerChurch Plus installing into its own directory, rather than being a subdirectory of Program Files, you are completely free to install it into whatever directory you choose.

The process I linked to above will fix all of this for you.