Even though I do not have a great solution, I wanted to post about a problem I'd been having and what I finally determined to be the cause. Over the past few weeks, I had posted a few questions here and in the Access:Other Topics forum, trying to figure out why a form of mine kept crashing my application. First I thought it was due to a requery, then I thought it was due to some sort of timing issue, then I thought it was due to some inefficiency in my code that I couldn't spot...
This is in Access XP and I have not tested it in other versions.
Anyway, in case anyone else might be experiencing an inexplicable crash, I wanted to make a note of the fact that, at least in my application, the combination of a continuous form, a domain aggregate function, and conditional formatting was causing my application to regularly crash. This was true even when I tried replacing the domain aggregate function (in my case, DLookup) with the "alternative" aggregate functions written by Trevor Best ( It was also true when I removed the function from the form and imbedded it in the underlying query. It took me so long to figure out what the problem was, because the crash was very unpredictable (i.e., I might perform the same action 15 times without incident, but on the 16th, it would crash).
Anyway, Access appears to not like these three items in tandem. I have a continuous form with conditional formatting that works fine. The same form also has a DLookup function (Now, tLookup, thanks to Trevor Best) in one of the fields. This also works fine. However, if I apply conditional formatting to that lookup field, the crashing returns, particularly when I run queries (and subsequently requery the form). I suspect the combination is just too much for Access to handle (computing the Dlookup and then figuring out which of those fields to highlight in a continous forms setting).
In my case, I was able to get around this due to the nature of my original conditional formatting (which was to apply highlighting if the field was not null). I was able to just apply pseudo-highlighting by inserting a symbol that looks like a filled-in space any time the field was not null. This has fixed my problem, but is of course particular to my application.
Even though I don't have a solution for others, this problem hindered my progress so much that I figured it was worth sharing with others, in case anyone has a similar crashing problem for which they are unable to identify the cause. By the way, I did receive an email from M$ at one point (in response to my repeated "Send Error Report" requests) indicating that they were "aware of a[n unspecified] bug in Access XP" which might be causing my problem, and which would be corrected in Service Pack 3. We'll see.![[hourglass]](/data/assets/smilies/hourglass.gif "[hourglass] [hourglass]")
Thanks to everyone who replied to my original posts asking for advice.
Patricia
This is in Access XP and I have not tested it in other versions.
Anyway, in case anyone else might be experiencing an inexplicable crash, I wanted to make a note of the fact that, at least in my application, the combination of a continuous form, a domain aggregate function, and conditional formatting was causing my application to regularly crash. This was true even when I tried replacing the domain aggregate function (in my case, DLookup) with the "alternative" aggregate functions written by Trevor Best ( It was also true when I removed the function from the form and imbedded it in the underlying query. It took me so long to figure out what the problem was, because the crash was very unpredictable (i.e., I might perform the same action 15 times without incident, but on the 16th, it would crash).
Anyway, Access appears to not like these three items in tandem. I have a continuous form with conditional formatting that works fine. The same form also has a DLookup function (Now, tLookup, thanks to Trevor Best) in one of the fields. This also works fine. However, if I apply conditional formatting to that lookup field, the crashing returns, particularly when I run queries (and subsequently requery the form). I suspect the combination is just too much for Access to handle (computing the Dlookup and then figuring out which of those fields to highlight in a continous forms setting).
In my case, I was able to get around this due to the nature of my original conditional formatting (which was to apply highlighting if the field was not null). I was able to just apply pseudo-highlighting by inserting a symbol that looks like a filled-in space any time the field was not null. This has fixed my problem, but is of course particular to my application.
Even though I don't have a solution for others, this problem hindered my progress so much that I figured it was worth sharing with others, in case anyone has a similar crashing problem for which they are unable to identify the cause. By the way, I did receive an email from M$ at one point (in response to my repeated "Send Error Report" requests) indicating that they were "aware of a[n unspecified] bug in Access XP" which might be causing my problem, and which would be corrected in Service Pack 3. We'll see.
Thanks to everyone who replied to my original posts asking for advice.Patricia
