windows 7 and Xara

[kinetica]

As a result of the last couple of posts I have switched my Vista back to UAC. In the beginning it seriously annoyed me, but I must say not having the "your computer is at risk" icon in the system tray is in itself reassuring. Of course in the beginning I was installing software and tweaking settings, which triggered UAC, but now that the machine is set up and ghosted I see no need to keep it switched off. But of course time will tell.

[Squeaky]

Just to spread the info.
I have scrapped the 64 bit version of 7 and gone over to 32bit. Thumbnails are back (As are my colour chips at the bottom of the screen - they got corrupted in 64bit) -Hurrah but....
I installed Xtreme as administator and in Vista compatibility mode and I STILL get the error:

'There was a problem sending the command to the program'

If I try to open a Xara file from windows explorer.

Just to be clear this does not happen if I open a Xara file from within Xtreme itself.

[DMerchen]

I have not been able to run Xara on my desktop. I was running Windows Vista 64 Bit, but I upgraded to Windows 7 64 Bit thinking that the compatibility issue might be resolved. I have tried to run Xara in Windows XP and Vista compatibility and as Administrator. Nothing seems to work. The program starts, I can see the window and icons, it asks if I want to register .web and .xar files, then the tip of the day windows opens and then the program shuts down. Is there anything I can do to get Xara to run on my computer? I have a few projects to work on and would like to use Xara for this purpose. I have looked through the forum, but it seems I have the same problem as Squeaky.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

David D. Merchen

[Mart]

Installed 32bit Windows 7 final (clean install) and got the following error message when opening a Xara file saved on the Desktop.

'There was a problem sending the command to the program'

The program continues to open the file. The error message can be closed and Xteme 4.0 runs OK. The message is annoying though and something I'd like to resolve.

Xara was installed under the compatibility setting of Vista SP2. However, I also got this problem when I was running Windows 7 RC1. Xara was installed using the compatibility setting for XP SP3 in that.

I've tried right-clicking and using 'Run as administrator' but nothing has stopped the error message in both the release candidate of final version of Windows 7.

Help and suggestions appreciated. Thanks.

[Soquili]

Hello Mart,

Do you use ZoneAlarm or any product that uses ZoneAlarm security?

Reviewing many of the results returned by a Google search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...h&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

ZoneAlarm seems to be the source of the error message going back to Windows 2000.
The fix appears to be to add the local loopback IP addresses to the trusted zone. IP address 127.0.0.1 and IP address 0.0.0.0

[Mart]

Hello Soquili and thanks - No ZoneAlarm. I have NIS (Norton) 2010 installed.

On the release candidate, I was using Microsoft Security Essentials and the Windows 7 firewall in conjunction with 'Sphinx' firewall control. I don't think the problem is security software related but could be wrong.

[Soquili]

Mart I'm only throwing out some guesses. I've never experienced the problem on my Windows 7 machine, or any machine.

Problems like yours are very difficult to diagnose without having physical access to the machine. Too many variables and having to toss out a guess and wait for a response, it doesn't lend itself to a successful resolution.

You could try disconnect your machine from the internet and disable all security software and reboot and verify the security software did not reenable itself. Then see of the error appears again.

From the information available in the google search results, the problem is due to something preventing DDE access to the file you are trying to open. This would more than likely have something to do with your security software.

There have been reports that Norton 2010 has issues with all versions of Windows. Are you running the most recent update available from Symantec's website?

[Mart]

There is an option box in XP where 'Use DDE' can be unticked for each file type. I believe unticking it for .xar would stand a good chance of curing this problem but unfortunately, Windows 7 doesn't have that option. Maybe it's a Registry key that does it now. I think the glitch is probably OS related but will try your suggestion of disabling all security software (while off-line) to make sure it isn't anything to do with that.

Many thanks for trying to help. I know what you mean about it being difficult to diagnose faults without actually having access to the computer.

I'll post back if I find an answer.

[James Loudon]

Here is my experience so far. I was previously runing X5 on an XP Pro 32 bit box. I have recently built a new workstation, i7 with 12gb ram runnng Win7 Ultimate 64 bit.
Xara does run, but its slow and rather jerky. Certainly not as smooth as it was. However the biggest problem us this - it will not recognise CMYK photos!
I had just made a colour leaflet for a client. It contained a bunch of photos that I exported from Photoshop as CMYK. My new install of x cannot see these. On a whim I went back to photoshop and converted the source photos back to RGB then imported into my Xara document and it worked. Now, there is some debate whether one should start with CMYK photos when the output process to PDF/X with be CMYK anyway, but the point is - this worked on the XP rig but not on this one.
So I'm a bit dissapointed.

[jeffb]

not yet on 7 but have run Xara Pro 5 on 64 bit vista Ultimate for over 12 months and no trouble at all, great program Xara rules all