One of the most popular pages on my site is the LINKS page where I have a comprehensive list of third party utilities that are available for Crystal Reports. These include Viewers and Schedulers as well as tools that do Email, Bursting and host of other useful services. You can also request a short review of my favorite utilities and the tasks for which they are best suited.
This past week I ran into some issues I started using my Vista laptop. Not all of the utilities are are fully compatible with Vista. Some just need to have their compatibility settings adjusted to be run in XP mode. Some need to be run as Administrator. Some do not run at all. For example, currently PDF eXPLODE does not work on Vista (but they are working on it).
If you run into any compatibility issues with Vista and Crystal or a Crystal utility, I would love to hear about it.
Here’s one: One day about six weeks ago I found that Crystal XI was taking forever (over a minute) to load. In addition, our applications that run Crystal reports now were taking well over a minute to run reports that had previously taken a few seconds to appear. Between then and now I have uninstalled and reinstalled all the Crystal software, service packs, upgrades, and applications that use Crystal for reporting. I have also purchased and run two registry cleaners and done manual purging of anything Crystal-related from the registry before re-loading. To make a long story short, the problem turns out to be related to Vista’s User Access Control (UAC). Crystal and our own app reporting runs fine if I disable UAC, or if I run the applications with the “Run as Administrator” property enabled. This is certainly not the case on every Vista system, but something on mine changed to cause this problem. I am just glad to finally have a work-around!