Plato in Windows 7 stopping when you point to File menu

With classes starting soon, we need help with this fast. We have just moved to Windows 7 in our user areas, and found the problem that after launching Plato, if you click on 'File' Plato crashes, saying that plato.exe has stopped working. If you use the icons for 'new file' or 'open file', it works fine all the way through to compiling and running.

The other menu items, 'help' etc., work fine.

Also, using the keyboard short-cuts for something under the File menu, e.g. ctrl-n for new file, causes the same crash.

This happens with both Plato 4.4 and Plato 3.3.

At first I thought the problem was due to our method of deployment (APP-V). But the same problem occurred when I installed Plato locally on a user area PC.

Try disabling 'Enhanced Menus' from the Options dialog.

The plato ini file will then have...

[Settings] NewMenuStyle=0

So this can be changed manually if the Options menu does not work.

I have tried selecting the option to disable enhanced menus. It then requires me to restart Plato. When I restart, I find that my setting has not been retained. I also tried as a test another setting (show line numbers) and found that when you restart Plato that also is not retained.

This is on a user area computer (Windows 7), logging in with admin rights and locally installing Plato.

I then tried looking for the plato.ini file, but could not find it.

Plato 3 gives the same crashing problem, and in that version there is no option to disable enhanced menus.

I have now managed to deploy Plato 4 in user areas with that option set for 'disable enhanced menus'. I can launch Plato and confirm that it is set, and I can see the plato3.ini file with NewMenuStyle=0 under Settings. But the crashing problem with 'File' still occurs.

With Plato 4.4 there is a difference between the 'Open' on the File menu and the 'Open' on the toolbar. The toolbar uses the Vista style Open dialog whilst the menu uses the older style.

I will send a forum message...

I have discovered that Plato works fine on our Win 7 64 bit image, while it gives that problem on our Win 7 32 bit image in user areas (even if installed locally as admin). So it looks as if either some dll file is lacking in the 32 bit image or perhaps it's the version of the Microsoft VC++ redistributable causing the problem.

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