Hmmm, try going into the VDMSound folder and deleting the "Tip of the Day". file.

Hopefully that will work for ya.

Thanks very much for the suggestion. I did try deleting that the last time I worked on this. No joy.

I found the keys in the registry that I thought would fix this:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Freeware\VDMSound]
"ShowTips"=dword:00000000
"NextTip"=dword:00000000

Changing the ShowTips to
"ShowTips"=dword:00000001
unfortunately also does not help.

Hmmm.

Okay, going to play with it a bit tonight. Creating different users with different levels of access on my box. Hopefully I can recreate the error....

Vlad checks the site pretty frequently so hopefully he has a fix.

Simple fix. Install as whoever, doesn't matter (Admin is best). When you get the error as user xyz (say, your daughter) then go to Control Panel (still logged in as user xyz) and choose to "Repair" VDMSound. Silly registry "Local Machine" vs. "Current User" screwup on my behalf, sorry.

V.

Thanks for the reply, Vladr. This isn't helping on my system either.

I tried the repair option, tried repair and then restart, tried restart and then repair. I am administrator, but not the original installer (I installed with my daughter's account).

When I use my own PIF, or when I right-click and choose "Run with VDMS" I still get the tip of the day error.

I remember that if I clean uninstall and then install as the new user, the tip works as expected for the new user - but then the other user will have the problem.

It's not a big deal on many programs because it just pops you back to windows and acknowledge the error and then continue. But on a few games, the interruption to Windows means the DOS game will not recover and run correctly.

Is there some way to manually tell the program to go ahead and skip the tip if you cannot get the tip to click the notip option? (Hope you can follow that).

Thanks again,
Strider

Just to make sure that you understood: you must run the "Repair" as the user who has the problem. This will create the appropriate entry in the registry. This is a known, functioning workaround. If it still doesn't work then log in as the user who installed VDMSound, pop up regedit, go to Current User (HKCU), Software, Freeware (I think), VDMSound, and export the entire tree to file. Then log back in as the user for who that does not work, and double-click on the file to import into that user's registry. "Repair" should have done that automatically...

Another option, one I used before I read about the repair thing here, is to simply install VDMSound as the target user. That generally works well here although I'll give the Repair a go when I next reinstall (which'll probably be late this year or early next year depending on when I get all the components for my new machine) VDMSound.

The suggestion to grab the registry settings from the working user and import as the non-working user did the trick. Yippee!

I had done the repair as the user who was getting the error. For some reason that didn't work for me.

I see that the missing key from the non-working registry settings above is the path for the help file.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Freeware\VDMSound]
"NextTip"=dword:00000000
"TipsFile"="C:\\Program Files\\VDMSound\\\\VDMSound.tips"
"ShowTips"=dword:00000000

Thanks again to both of you.

Strider

Good deal. Closing this thread: RESOLVED.