Is your copy up to date?
Each of the changes listed here shows which Cardbox files have changed, and the date.  You can check the dates of your Cardbox program files by running Cardbox and entering the command Help, About, More.

Microsoft have just released an update to Windows XP which installs a new bug.  Microsoft's bug causes Cardbox to report the following message:

You did not run the SHARE command before starting Windows. Cardbox will not be able to access linked or embedded objects. To correct this situation, exit from Windows, return to DOS, type SHARE, and restart Windows.

We have changed CBOXOBJ.DLL so that this message is not reported.

If you had a macro that modified fields that did not exist in the current format, Cardbox would crash.

If you used an external file to specify a list of values for a validator, Cardbox would open it for "exclusive access", which meant that if two people simultaneously used a validator at exactly the same moment, one of them would fail.  Cardbox now uses "shared read access", so this problem no longer arises.

If you used "File, Transfer, Write", and you had previously defined an immense number of custom output formats (typically, over 100), then Cardbox would crash.

If you used "File, Transfer, Write" to output data in "Print to Disk" format, and some fields were more than 32KB in size, Cardbox would crash or produce incorrect output.

If you used "File, Utilities, Repair" to rebuild a database, and any records in the database had more than 64KB in size, those records were being marked as invalid, and discarded, even if they were actually valid.

If you used the Windows XP desktop theme, then the status bar at the bottom of the Cardbox window would appear a little too tall, making the browse bar look strange - although everything still worked perfectly.  This problem did not affect the Classic desktop theme.  It has now been corrected.

If you are using a release of Cardbox in which CARDBOX.EXE is dated earlier than 29 February 2000, then you must upgrade, because the crash on starting Cardbox under Windows 2000 is also present in Windows XP.

When a custom sequence is calculated, it is stored in the database file, replacing any previously calculated custom sequence.  A bug meant that the space occupied by the old custom sequence was not always completely reused, so that the database grew a little each time that you recalculated a custom sequence.

Following the change to CBOXIMG.DLL on 23/4/01, some Cardbox-compressed images did not display properly, although they could still be saved or copied to the Clipboard.

When you define a specialised mailing label format, this is now stored in the format file as well as in your CBOX.INI file.  This means that anyone else using the database will be able to access the label format without having to copy the definition into CBOX.INI first.  Note: if there is a definition in CBOX.INI, that takes precedence.  The format file definition is there simply as a fallback.

When you type a Web or email address into Word 2000, it underlines it and turns it into a hyperlink.  This also means that when you copy it to the Clipboard, it is copied as a Word field rather than as text.  Previously, Cardbox couldn't see the text inside the field, so the address wouldn't get pasted into Cardbox.  Now Cardbox looks inside the field and sees the text.

Most programs (including Word, Photoshop, Paint, and Paint Shop Pro) could understand the format in which Cardbox copied images to the Clipboard.  Others (including WordPad and PhotoImpression 2000) couldn't.  This was because of an ambiguity in Microsoft's definition of the standard Windows image format.  We have now changed the format that Cardbox uses so that all programs will be able to understand its images.

If you have defined a non-standard collating sequence for your database, and this contains special indexing rules about what is considered to be a number or date and what is considered to be a word, these rules are also now followed when you are making a search command (including relational search).

Some new Windows fonts, including those installed in Internet Explorer 5.0, report themselves as being unnaturally wide when Cardbox asks them for their maximum character width.  Cardbox is now sceptical about what it is told by Windows, and makes its own calculations.

If you used per-item appearances in your format, and you specified "Translate underlines to spaces" in your printer settings, then this setting was ignored for any fields that had a per-item appearance, and any underlines within those fields were printed as underlines and not as spaces.

If you used per-item appearances in your format, and you used File, Transfer, Write to output some records, and you used the "Write formatted records to a file (*.PRN)" option, then Cardbox might crash.  This problem was intermittent and depended on particular kinds of per-item appearance being used in particular places.

If you were using the image list control to rearrange the sequence of images attached to a single record, and you had so many images that the list control had scroll bars, then moving images would sometimes move them to incorrect places in the sequence.

If you had Cardbox open when Windows shut down (so that Cardbox would restart automatically), then on restart, the macro filename would be changed to "start", making your macros invisible until you used the Macro Manager to switch back to the original macro file.

The status bar would sometimes show incorrect information after running a macro.  This would happen, for instance, when the macro switched from a window that was browsing to one that was editing.

The Open File dialog box has a check box that you can turn on if you want to open a file for read-only access only.  If you did not turn on this check box, and tried to open a database that was marked as read-only by Windows (but this problem does not always affect a database on a CDROM), and the file had a filename or directory name that did not conform to the old "8.3" DOS convention, then Cardbox would report "Access Denied" instead of silently opening the file as read-only, which is the correct behaviour.

The number of images that you could display per record was limited to about 10 or so, depending on the image size (the number quoted is for A4 documents).  This limit has been substantially increased, to between 50 and 70 A4 pages.

At the same time we have removed a few small bugs that had crept in to the display of image icons.  Image icons are now equally visible on both VGA and SVGA displays, and the facility for moving the icons (in order to reshuffle the order of images in the document) is fully operational.

As a result of what we will politely call an "unscheduled feature" in Windows 2000, Cardbox crashes on startup.  The error reported is "CARDBOX caused a General Protection Fault in module CARDBOX.EXE at 000E:0922". We have altered Cardbox to make it immune to this problem.

The Repair function (File, Utilities, Repair) creates a repaired database but does not replace the damaged database with a repaired one, despite saying that it has done so.  This is another consequence of faulty long-filename support in Windows.
Also, database lock files (filetype .LOK) are not always erased automatically when the last copy of the database is closed: this has no harmful effects but may be puzzling if you look at the contents of a directory.