User Support Forum

Questions & issues regarding PowerChurch online:

I have been using PowerChurch Plus 10 (the most recent maintenance release) for several months. I just started using PowerChurch online yesterday (January 11). For the most part, it seems to be working fine, but I am having issues with printing reports to disk, backup, etc. -- the biggest problem seems to be that I seemingly cannot save anything to Drive C on my computer. My questions and issues:

1. Do I need to uninstall PowerChurch Plus 10 in order for PowerChurch online to function properly?

2. When I try to write any type of report to disk, and the screen comes up for me to choose the location, if I try browsing the location, it will not allow me to select anything on Drive C. E.g., if I try to select "My Documents", I receive the message "This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator." in a message box labeled "Restrictions".

3. If I leave it on the default location -- "C:\Documents and Settings\pcu48864\My Documents\PCREPORT.DOC" for a Word document, I receive a message saying the file already exists, even though it does not. (The directory did not even exist on my computer, until I created it, just to see if that would help matters.) The program acts as if it is writing a file and tries to open it, but no file is actually written anywhere on my hard drive.

4. Do I actually need to set up a "user" account on my computer with username "pcu48864"? if so, does it need some special settings to work properly?

5. Or, do I likely need to modify some firewall and/or other settings?

6. I do have a second hard drive that I can save to, but unfortunately, I need to change the default location every time I try to print a report to disk.

7. When I save a Word document to the other hard drive, with the option to open the document in Word checked, PowerChurch Online is opening up WordPad instead of Word, so that it fails to load the document -- of course. Any thoughts on how to fix this? I have never run into this problem in standalone PowerChurch plus, which opens up documents without any trouble.

8. If I save an Acrobat or Excel document in the same manner, PowerChurch Online will not open it.

9. For a custom report with Excel output, I could not find a way to get an actual Excel file written anywhere -- I tried renaming the output file D:\ QMFtemp -- and although PowerChurch indicated it wrote an Excel file, I could not locate any new Excel spreadsheet on either hard drive.

10. When I choose to backup to a folder, and click the button to browse for a folder name, I immediately get error messages saying that "The folder desktop cannot be used. Please choose another folder.", and likewise for My Documents. Drive C is then unavailable for backup; I can backup to a folder on Drive D.

Any help is greatly appreciated. -- John Staudt

John,

I recalled that there was an issue with this during BETA testing, and what happens is that the drives are mapped by the system. So Drive C: and D: are not what you think they are. I found a post which may help. This is an excerpt from it.

You can save a report locally by:

From the save Report As screen, click the change button.
Open the Save in drop down and you will see your local drives listed. When you connect, the server maps your local drives to drive letters like network maps. When I login, my local C: drive is mapped to drive N:. So if I save a file to drive N: I can save it to my local hard drive.

Hope this helps.

Definitely check out what tborgal says, because that's exactly how it works. However, there is an issue that has come to our attention in the last couple of days where some users are reporting that their C: drive isn't available at all (it should be mapped as the E: drive in most cases). From our testing, and anecdotal evidence, it seems to be a problem with Linksys routers.

We had a user report that their C: drive wasn't available, we ran through all sorts of troubleshooting things, and she casually mentioned that she was running a network with a Linksys router, does that matter? It shouldn't, but I have since tested with several networks both wired and wireless, and I was able to recreate the issue on the networks with Linksys routers. This never showed up for us because we don't have Linksys routers in our offices. I've reported this to the IDS guys, and they're testing it too. I'm surprised they haven't run into it before because the Linksys model that we're talking about is probably the most popular wireless router available.

It sounds like since you can see other drives, but not your C: drive, you may be having the same problem. We're working on a solution! In the meantime, do continue to use your other hard drive to save things locally. If you try to save to the default location, you're actually saving it to your user's profile on the server, and you can't access that. That's what the restrictions message is all about. The server drives are locked down so no one can access those.

We're also working with the IDS guys to get a better way to handle saving files locally, regardless of this (apparent) Linksys problem.

For what it's worth, mine is a Belkin router. My secondary hard disk, drive D, is mapped to E:. Drive C is not available at all. And then, there is the issue of opening the files from within PowerChurch once they are written to the disk.

With further testing, it doesn't seem to be a router thing, that was just an amazing coincidence. We're working on it.

Ok, the problem with the missing C: drive has been resolved, and you should see that it's back the next time you log on. Sorry about the inconvenience.