Hello all,

I am checking out your product and really like it, but I have a problem. I downloaded it at home about a week or two ago and it had features that aren't there in the download I pulled down to my work computer. The weather module on my home computer has locations to select from, and the latest download has no locations. Also, the home computer installation has themes out of the box, where the work installation does not.

I thought it may be a network issue, so I installed the same file on my home laptop and had the same problem. Is there a way to fix this. I really want to buy the product as I really like it, but I want the weather module to work. As an aside, nice work guys. This is a really fun and useful product. Keep up the good work

Seems to me that you installed the UPGRADE package (5.38 MB) instead of the FULL install (14.9 MB) on your work PC and home laptop.

Download the full Winstep Xtreme 8.2 package from HERE, re-install and see if that solves your problem.

I just went to the link you posted and downloaded / installed the file and the same thing. I am sure I downloaded the right file from the download page as well. Could the wrong install package be on that link?

No. Couple of questions:

1 - What Windows version are you using?
2 - Are you running as the Adminstrator when you install?
3 - Look in your My Documents folder. You should find a shortcut there to the Winstep user data folder. Open that up. Do you see a 'Weather' folder there? What is inside it?
4 - If you can't find the Winstep data folder, look in C:\Program Files\Winstep. What folders do you see there?

1 - What Windows version are you using?
--All computers I use are XP sp2

2 - Are you running as the Adminstrator when you install?
--Yes, I am a member of administrators group. Main difference of the two computers (work desktop and laptop) are that they are on my work domain, where home PC is workgroup. I am the Data Center Manager so I have the appropriate permissions.

3 - Look in your My Documents folder. You should find a shortcut there to the Winstep user data folder. Open that up. Do you see a 'Weather' folder there? What is inside it?
--There is a shortcut in my "My Documents" folder. I did also find that folder under All Users\Shared Documents\Winstep. I did find the "Weather" folder and it contained Icons1, Icons2, METARWCOMData.txt. I was able to go in and grab some codes manually and it partially worked.

4 - If you can't find the Winstep data folder, look in C:\Program Files\Winstep. What folders do you see there?
--AutoInstall, Backup, Export, Help, Licenses, NeXus, Themes, Versions

Dan

The Themes, Export, Licenses, Versions and NeXuS folders should all be empty. Make sure they are, please post back their creation date and then delete them. The critical folders are Licenses and Themes - with those two gone Xtreme will then look in the proper data location, which is actually the folder structure in the Shared Documents folder, NOT the one in Program Files. After deleting the Themes and License folders in \Program Files\Winstep\, simply restarting Xtreme will solve the problem.

I have no idea how this happened, but I would like to. Clean installs of Xtreme should use the folder structure in Shared Documents, while UPGRADES from previous versions should retain the older folder structure in Program Files for backwards compatibility. In your case, the two modes got mixed up.

They were created on March 4, 2008 at 10:58:43. I have now deleted them. I imported a bunch of themes and they were in the C:\Program Files\Winstep\Themes directory. I coppied the contents of that folder to the All Users Theme directory. When I go to reinstall the themes it puts them right back to the C:\Program Files\Winstep\Themes directory. I am going to completely remove the app, hack it out of the reg (if it is there), and delete all directories and try again.

No dice, same thing. I am out of ideas. Could it have to do with being in a domain environment? Could the install package be wrong?

What tells Winstep where to find it's files? I also found the default themes in a zip file in All Users, but it didn't unpack during install

I had some success by adding my domain account with full access to the all users profile (explicitly) and now the weather shows up correctly. The themes still want to use program files, but it is working. All of the default themes and sounds I extracted to the themes folder and it is working somewhat better. Any ideas or suggestions?

Sorry for the delay in replying. Other than your domain environment suggestion, I now have no idea about what the problem might be.

Prior to Windows Vista all user data (that includes themes and configuration files such as weather locations, etc, that might be changed by the user) was stored in folders under c:\program files\winstep\ . With Vista the location of user data had to be changed since c:\program files\ and its sub-folders are read-only. Winstep user data was thus moved to a sub-folder of Shared Documents (Public Documents in Vista), with Shared Documents being chosen because the data had to be available (and visible) to all the users on the machine.

The problem was that, in order to maintain backwards compatibility with pre-v8.2 installations of Winstep Xtreme, the older folder structure had to be supported as well. So, the installer checks to see if the c:\program files\winstep\themes and c:\program files\winstep\licenses\ folder already exist before installing. If they do not, then a clean installation is assumed and the new Shared Documents folder structure is used, otherwise it is assumed this is an upgrade or install over an existing previous version and the older folder structure where everything is under c:\program files\winstep\ is maintained.

When Winstep Xtreme runs, it does pretty much the same thing: if the themes and licenses folders do not exist under c:\program files\winstep then it looks for the data in Shared Documents.

In your system, something is obviously interfering with this process, which leads to BOTH folder structures being used and the consequent problem of user data being available in one location but not the other.

Guess I will have to catch up on what a domain environment is.