Published on November 20, 2005 By Autumnmist In Stardock Support General
I'm getting the Data Source Not Found error from Windowblinds.... BUT I know *exactly* what caused it to happen.

WB5 was working fine for the past 2 weeks. Then tonight, I decided I wanted to delete one of the skins I have installed. I press "Delete this skin" in the WB config window. Windowblinds thinks for a few seconds and then gives me the Data Source Not Found error. Clicking the Rebuild List button does not fix things.

I do *not* have a skins.mbb file in my Windowblinds directory (at least I don't anymore).

Can I fix this without uninstalling and reinstalling WB like I did last time I had this problem? Last time, I was fairly certain the problem appeared when I deleted a skin but I wasn't sure. Stupid me, I thought Stardock might've fixed this error already, but alas. Can anyone help?

Comments
on Nov 20, 2005
other than this post showing in the list - maybe one of these? Link
on Nov 20, 2005
I've already checked all those posts. Most of the troubleshooting seems to be targetting people with a modified Windows installation, which I do not have, and I know this problem only appeared after using WB5 successfully for a while.

The linked file from SD Support in one of the threads doesn't actually link to any file.

In any case, I ended up replacing skins.mdb from one of the archived insalls of Windowblinds and then rebuilding the list.

However, I think Stardock definitely needs to fix this since it's clear that the "Delete This Skin" button is doing a lot more than just deleting that skin! It's deleting the entire skins database and it does it repeatedly.
on Nov 21, 2005

Thank you for looking into the issue. I'd like to report this to the development team, however I'm unable to reproduce the issue here.

Could you provide more information? Which skin had you deleted when you encountered this issue?

-Mike
[Stardock Support]

on Nov 21, 2005
So replacing the skins.mdb from archive "fixed" this delete problem, rather you got WB working again?

Posted via WinCustomize Browser/Stardock Central
on Nov 21, 2005
Replacing skins.mdb "fixes" the skin list problem and I no longer get prompted to pick a data source. However, I lost all associations between Windowblinds and .wba files. I ended up uninstalling WB and then reinstalling through SDC to get things back to normal.

@milksama - This most recent time, I deleted Mike's Arrow theme. The last time I believe I was trying to delete Dogma.

The interesting thing is that this appears to be an error in which Windowblinds deletes every single config file in the Windowblinds installation folder except the dlls! Of course, skins.mdb is one of the deleted files so that results in the Data Source error.

Since I uninstalled and reinstalled Windowblinds through SDC, I can actually send you the backup file SDC created of my WB installation folder, if that will help. Let me know where I should email it, if so.

The only loose files in the backup zip in the \Base folder (e.g. the Windowblinds installation folder) are:

WbSrv.dll
wblind.dll
wbconfig.exe
WBDB.dll
tray.dll
wbhelp.dll


I think you'll agree that that is definitely NOT right!
on Nov 21, 2005
I wonder if unloading WB before deleting does the same?
on Nov 21, 2005
Lol... I suppose I could try over break and see if WB screws up the deletion again if the deletion is done while unloaded. *shudders*
on Nov 22, 2005

I think I might know why that is happening now.

It might happen if you had already deleted the skin directory from the HD and so WBConfig is unable to switch into the directory when it deletes files.

on Nov 22, 2005
But I didn't already delete the skin directory (why would I try to delete the skin twice?). I was attempting to delete the folder directly from WBconfig precisely so that I would (haha) be able to avoid any problems of that sort.