[rjonkman]

Hi, I hoped you could help me with a nagging problem concerning winfax on a computer currently running windows 2000as.

[intro]
A very small company i’m working for has used winfax 9 for a couple of years running on windows 98. It was only used to send faxes to customers from within a custom application build in delphi. I’m performing bug-fixes, changes and additions to this program. almost a year ago some changes where made and the computer hosting the program and winfax became a windows xp computer (winfax changed to version 10.3). After some initial problems i got it to work (the algorithm in place was about the same as the one offered on this site). However, recent changed brought the program to a windows 2000 advanced server pc, with winfax alongside it.
[/intro]

A problem emerged quite quickly: with every restart, the winfax drivers (called ‘winfax pro’ and ‘winfax pro (photo quality)’ in the printers tab of the configuration panel) where gone. The only way to reinstall them was the insprint.exe file from the winfax directory. As a solution i integrated this with the startup procedure ( at hklmsoftwaremicrosoftwindowscurrentversionrun). This worked after some fashion. The problem with this however, is that the settings seem to be incorrect – faxes may either have the y axis wrong, making the lines appear two or three centimeters from each other and causing the fax not to fit on the page, or have the x axis wrong, causing some words to be printed half over each other and making tables unreadable.

The above is caused by the program, which adapts to the reported resolution (in dpi) the faxdriver returns. Changing the resolution to low quality and then back to normal in the driver seems to solve the problem temporarilily, but i’m sure you can imagine this just won’t do.

I was hoping you could tell me what might be causing this problem of the driver disappearing on every restart. Tia,

Roel Jonkman

[Anonymous]

According to Symantec, this is caused by a problem with a missing Framedyn.dll file in Windows XP (SP1) which probably is the same for Windows 2000 AS.

To resolve the problem, copy the Framedyn.dll file to the System32 folder, and then run Insprint.exe to reinstall the WinFax printer.

Framedyn.dll should be in the i386 or WindowsSystem32dllcache

You then should remove InSprint from your startup, so it doesn’t always run at startup and then test…

[rjonkman]

I fear I have wasted a bit of your time by neglecting to say that I have already visited the symantec support database. By using some relevant search terms I did end up at this link, which gives some basic info about dealing with this kind of problem on windows 98. At the bottom there’s a link to the page you undoubtedly refer to with your statements about framedyn.dll

I have tried this (putting framedyn.dll at ‘WINNTSystem32’ ), but to no avail – the problem sadly remains. Because the problem I’m having is win2000 and the description of the problem said it should only pop up after installing service pack 1. Ofcourse, the change that brought this about might also have been implemented in a service pack or patch for windows 2000, but it doesn’t seem to be fixable in the same way.

Is there anything else you think might be worth giving a try? thanks!

[Anonymous]

have you tried reinstalling the program files only while logged in as Administrator?

In addition, is the printing problem occuring only in one application? for example, attaching or printing from Microsoft Word?

[rjonkman]

I have tried reinstalling a couple of times (logged in both as administrator or as a user with administrative rights); but not program files only. I’ll try that possibility next time I’m on location.

We use winfax only for the custom program described above. The problem should occur in programs like word too, since the ‘printer’ winfax installs is just gone. This is the basis of the entire problem — there is no ‘winfax’ printer visible in the printers pane of the control panel.

I’ve also tried getting winfax to work by adding a printer and trying to connect to a winfax port, but had no success in that regard. Is this a line of thought worth persuing? I’m not really familiar with these settings.

[Anonymous]

@rjonkman wrote:

We use winfax only for the custom program described above. The problem should occur in programs like word too, since the ‘printer’ winfax installs is just gone. This is the basis of the entire problem — there is no ‘winfax’ printer visible in the printers pane of the control panel.

I was referring to the output problem, not the missing printer driver. Its possible that the output problem only occurs in the application you are using, and not other applications.

Symantec claims incompatibility with Windows 2000 Advanced Server (they don’t recommend WinFax being used on it)

Does this app have to run on the server? have you tried using it on another test machine to see if you get similar results?

[rjonkman]

First of all: I have had no luck reinstalling just the system part of winfax

I was referring to the output problem, not the missing printer driver. Its possible that the output problem only occurs in the application you are using, and not other applications.

I have just tested with word; It prints just fine, though, one may argue that word might send the data to be printed as a single image, which doesn’t need any recalibrating. The program works a bit differently–
Consider the page to be printed a ‘canvas’ on which lines of text will be drawn. The location of such a line is defined by it’s starting coordinates; for example, a line may start at (1000,1000) which brings the start of the line 1000 pixels from the left and 1000 from the top.
The problem now, is caused by a difference between the size of this canvas reported at the start; consider the width and length of the document to be 2000×3000 pixels. if the document is spaced and lined out on this number, but it’s in reality a lot more, say 2000×6000 pixels, the distance between lines will be about twice as big, and the document now takes 2 pages to print.
Something like this is currently happening at the computer we are using.

Symantec claims incompatibility with Windows 2000 Advanced Server (they don’t recommend WinFax being used on it)

You are right, I was under the impression it was supposed to work because of this document. After a little querying on account of your post i found this
one, which indeed states this incompatibility/unrecommended situation. I can only hope this doesn’t make it unresolvable.

Does this app have to run on the server? have you tried using it on another test machine to see if you get similar results?

It has run successfully on both windows xp (after some tweaking on the timing) and windows 98 (winfax 9) in the past.

At this moment, there is no computer available which can be accustomed to this task. If the problem persists, this might be the course of action to take. It’s either that, or looking for another faxing solution with scripting posibilities.

At this moment, I’m trying to solve the problem by modifying the program to use a fixed size for the canvas. It’s less generic code, but it should do the trick for this specific problem. The fact that the ‘printer’ is gone at every restart would ofcourse not be solved by this.

[JohnD]

@rjonkman wrote:

First of all: I have had no luck reinstalling just the system part of winfax

I was referring to the output problem, not the missing printer driver. Its possible that the output problem only occurs in the application you are using, and not other applications.

I have just tested with word; It prints just fine, though, one may argue that word might send the data to be printed as a single image, which doesn’t need any recalibrating. The program works a bit differently–
Consider the page to be printed a ‘canvas’ on which lines of text will be drawn. The location of such a line is defined by it’s starting coordinates; for example, a line may start at (1000,1000) which brings the start of the line 1000 pixels from the left and 1000 from the top.
The problem now, is caused by a difference between the size of this canvas reported at the start; consider the width and length of the document to be 2000×3000 pixels. if the document is spaced and lined out on this number, but it’s in reality a lot more, say 2000×6000 pixels, the distance between lines will be about twice as big, and the document now takes 2 pages to print.
Something like this is currently happening at the computer we are using.

Symantec claims incompatibility with Windows 2000 Advanced Server (they don’t recommend WinFax being used on it)

You are right, I was under the impression it was supposed to work because of this document. After a little querying on account of your post i found this
one, which indeed states this incompatibility/unrecommended situation. I can only hope this doesn’t make it unresolvable.

Does this app have to run on the server? have you tried using it on another test machine to see if you get similar results?

It has run successfully on both windows xp (after some tweaking on the timing) and windows 98 (winfax 9) in the past.

At this moment, there is no computer available which can be accustomed to this task. If the problem persists, this might be the course of action to take. It’s either that, or looking for another faxing solution with scripting posibilities.

At this moment, I’m trying to solve the problem by modifying the program to use a fixed size for the canvas. It’s less generic code, but it should do the trick for this specific problem. The fact that the ‘printer’ is gone at every restart would ofcourse not be solved by this.

Both documents indicate incompatibility with Windows 200x Advanced Server (check the notes in the first document). I would recommend trying it on another machine if you can. It would probably save a lot of headache of trying to troubleshoot this. Even if you do modify your code to print properly, if anything changes (like the OS) or you move the app to another machine at a later time that modified code may not work properly on the new machine. You’ll just have to make note of this and remember what changes you did…

The missing printer driver that you reinstall at each boot up may be the cause of the printing problem, or it may not be. Until you can fix that problem, you can’t really tell if thats the case. This may be one of the incompatibility problems with Windows 2000 AS, but this problem was known to occur in Windows XP as well!

Have you tried reverting back to version 10.0 instead of 10.03??? This is a possibility to correct any problems. Do not use 10.02!

Also, Microsoft Fax that is built into Windows 2000 and Windows XP does have a Fax API. This is an possible alternative, plus you wouldn’t have to pay for the software since its already included with Windows.

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