Crystal Reports 8.5 stopped working after build.

[smc0862]

We have a product that uses VB6.0 and Crystal Reports 8.5. We build the source code within a VMWare image. The source code has been building fine for over 6-7 months within this VMWare image and during QA the product works fine and the reports can be viewed.

Just prior to releasing a service pack for our product, the reports stopped working (Murphy's Law). When viewing a report all we get is a blank grey page.

The bizarre thing is that this seemed to happen over the weekend when the clocks were changed back. The Friday build worked fine, the Monday build did not. Reviewing the source code changes revealed none that would have impacted the reports. Automatic updates are disabled in the build environment, so no updates were applied over the weekend in question.
And this also happened to us about a year ago and we needed to rebuild the VM image to get the build working again.

I tried a System Restore back to when there was a good build of the product and still the reports fail to display now after a build. I eventually had to revert back to a VMWare snapshot that was 6 months old to get the service pack building and reports working again. Now with the service pack released I'm trying to get the original image working again.

Our core project includes the CRAXDRT.DLL component and it's behaving as if a license has expired due the the setting back of the clocks and although the project compiles without errors, at runtime the reports don't work.


Has anyone else experienced this sort of behavior and if so, what is the cause of it? Any suggestions on solving this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

-Shawn

[smc0862]

I should also mention that our QA is automated using TestPartner. Each new build is installed into a clean Windows XP environment. Our product installer which is generated by our build process uses the InstallShield Standalone Builder and no new/updated merge modules have been added to the build system.

I also loaded in the 'Friday' source code and built the product to eliminate the code changes that were introduced prior to the weekend in question and the reports fail to work now.

-Shawn