Ever have one of those experiences that leave you feeling like a complete moron?

I just had one – and I’m going to share my experience with you so that anyone  who runs into the same (or similar problem) can learn from my 8 hours of hair pulling, cursing and confusion mis-fortune.

Background

One of my clients ordered the Sage AP-1063 Extended Solution that enables ACH processing for accounts payable. Think of it as anothe form of direct deposit – only instead of direct depositing employee checks you’ll be depositing vendor payments (aka – wire transfers).

Before I ordered I casually noted that the client was on version 4.05 (first mistake – they were on version 4.1). When Sage sent the Extended Solution I logged in at 7:15 AM remotely with the client and began the installation.

Unfortunately the version 4.05 install routine did not check to make sure it was actually installing to a version 4.05 system – -and dutifully installed itself over my version 4.10 system.

Luckily I caught this and quickly determined that version 4.10 of the Extended Solution was needed. Once I ordered the re-packaged part, Sage was quick to email it over to me.

Here’s where the fun began.

Extended Solutions Say’s “Now Installing Extended Solutions” – Forever

Technically the message did not stay there forever. After three hours the client wisely decided to end task and call.

From there I logged in and we engaged Sage to assist in looking at the issue. Neither of us were able to determine the cause due to the lack of any error messages.

As a final resolution Sage offered to look at the data (all 5 GB) if we would upload to them. Fearing the lengthy upload time (easily a day or two on the clients poky network) I declined to upload.

Luckily the client ran into another error — Error 88 SY_Report.PVC Line 203.

This error message was in the knowledgebase and the cure was very simple. Luckily the cure for the above error also resolved totally my “Now Installing Extended Solutions” hung installation problem.

The Resolution

The fix for both the error message and the hung Extended Solution install routine was to go into the \MAS90\SOA folder and delete any SY_*.PVC files (I suggest you move these somewhere as opposed to outright deleting – just in case).

Once those files were deleted, the Extended Solution installed just fine and all error messages vanished. My theory is that the v4.05 Extended Solution may have dumped those SY_*.PVC files into \MAS90\SOA which in turn caused all my subsequent error conditions.

Hope this is helpful to someone else in the future.