Electronics Forum / CAD / January 2008

From time to time I run across a problem which is a real stumper, and
ultimately fruitless searching online for others who might have encountered
the same issue, I will bang my head long enough to solve it myself.

So, I present an example of my own stupidity in the hopes that future users
will be able to avoid feeling this retarded...

A few days ago I fire up Protel to finish up a board redesign. The design
had seen a couple of bizarre field failures which needed fixed quickly. This
meant I needed to get new board files out ASAP. I go into the CAM manager
and try to get it to generate new gerbers and the damn thing crashes. No
warning, it just closes Protel. This hasn't happened to me in years, and
never under WinXP.

Several attempts to generate gerbers gave duplicate results. I had Protel do
a "repair" of the .ddb, no difference. So I uninstall and reinstall Protel
and SP6. In the process I notice that some .ddb's will generate gerbers and
some won't. I'm now wondering if McAfee is messing with my install, or if
some WinXP service pack hosed my system. I need to get this file generated
and boards out, so I backup everything and reformat and reinstall Windows
XP. May seem harsh, but it's faster most other options. I now have a nice
clean system which allowed Protel to crash much more efficiently. ;-)

I notice that the crashing is different now. Instead of just closing out,
it's giving the following popup "Access violation at address 40004AF0 in
module vcl50.bpl"

Nice. Now I have something to work with. A few searches later turns up that
this is a Delphi runtime file, circa late 90's. I get my hands on a newer
version and replace the old file. No difference.

A little more searching dredges up some instruction on doing a clean
reinstall of Protel (such which additional files to delete and where they
live) and I follow this procedure. Reinstall for probably the 10th time and
get the same results.

So I'm wondering if one of my libraries is corrupted. I make a small board
from a fresh .ddb (I did this several time prior to reformatting the HD and
it didn't help) and start adding in components one at a time, but now I'm
able to generate CAM files without trouble. It's at this point I notice
something. I had placed the new test .ddb directly into my "my documents"
folder instead of in the nested folders where I keep my working files
normally...

A few tests later this is confirmed as the source of the trouble. While
Protel does support long file names, the error handling for exceeding the
255 character limit is buggy. In addition to the "my documents" folder being
2 folders deep itself, the filenames within the .ddb are included in
reaching this limit.

The solution was to simply move the folders back a little to shorten the
filenames. I suspect this to be the source of several problems I'd had with
Protel in the past including the "Board in 3D" function crashing.

Just glad it's fixed. Now if I can only figure out why the advpcb.txt does
not get updated properly for those pesky text designators...

Chris