Serious problem with Adobe Pagemaker 6.5 ?

["Peter Ring, PRC" <prc -at- PIP -dot- DKNET -dot- DK>]

Colleagues,

I have got a very serious problem, probably related to PageMaker 6.5,
and I am looking for other people who has (seen) the same problem in
order to help Adobe (or wherever the problem comes from) and me to
solve it.

(Eric: I am asking this list because there are many very frequent
PageMaker users here.)

I have of course asked Adobe's hot-line, and they have (after seeing
a screen shot) at least accepted, that I have a problem, but they
don't think it comes from PM6.5. They also warned me not to blame
Adobe, and of course I am not 100% sure the error is coming from
Adobe (nobody knows before it's solved, innocent until proven
guilty, etc.), but the evidence is quite strong:

The problem started minutes after updating my Adobe Pagemaker 4.0 to
6.5 UK. As a first test, I imported a PM4 file (which I had been
working on in PM4 until an hour before) in PM6.5 - and got this new
and very frustrating error for the first time:

When a word is underscored it "draws" a rectangle (here marked as
XXXX'es) in the colour of the underscored text, starting at the upper
left corner of the underscored text going to the left and the top of
the screen, like this (where _____ and | = the screen edges):
 _______________________________________________________________
|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
|XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
|   ... normal text _Underscored text_ normal text continued ...
|

The rectangle don't appear before the area with the underscored text
is re-drawn on the screen, e.g. after a zoom, a scroll, or a page
shift. There can be many rectangles on the page in many colours, one
for each underscored text. The coloured fields can be temporarily
wiped more or less out by marking the covered text, by scrolling
down or to the right, or by dragging e.g. a dialogue box over the
field. But it reappears as soon as the upper left corner of the
underscored text is refreshed.

The error don't appear on the print-out, and it is independent of the
printer selected. It is also independent of the screen mode e.g.
1280x1024 or 640x480.

The error is now initiated if I run any of these programmes and the
SCREEN includes an underscored text:

  PageMaker 4 DK and 6.5 UK
  MS PowerPoint 4.0a and 7.0

"Initiated" means, that if I have made made an underscore in any of
those programmes, the error will show here and in all other
programmes affected by the error until I reboot Win95.

It then "infects" some other programmes. "Infects" means that the
error appears here only if the error has been initiated by one of the
above mentioned programmes after the last (re)boot of the PC. The
"infectable" programmes in my PC are:

  MS Internet Explorer 3.01
  Netscape Gold 3
  MS Windows 95 Help !!!

Programmes which are not affected at all are:

  MS Word 7.0
  MS Excel 7.0
  MS WordPad
  CorelDraw 6.0
  Adobe Acrobat Reader 3.0
  Netscape Navigator 1.0
  Ventura 4.1.1

Neither de-installing PM 6.5 nor re-installation of PM6.5 helped.
The recent free bug-fix update to PM 6.51 didn't help either
(expectedly - it's dated before my installation).

My best guess is that a .dll (or equivalent) file from PM6.5 has
replaced an original file of another origin, and that this new file
courses the error. It might be that it is only a problem in
combination with some types of hardware or software, e.g. the screen
driver card, or a combination of two .dll files that don't "like"
eachother.

I have tested ALL files on my PC for virus with the latest version of
McAfee (January 1997), and it found nothing.

I (and Adobe Denmark's hot-line) will be very grateful if anybody can
help me/us with information on this subject - including information
about having seen this problem with other programmes, or just seen
the problem.

Greetings from Denmark

Peter Ring
PRC (Peter Ring Consultants)
- specialists in user friendly manuals and audits on manuals.
prc -at- pip -dot- dknet -dot- dk
http://www.pip.dknet.dk/~pip323/index.html
- the "User Friendly Manuals" website with links, bibliography, list
  of prof. associations, and tips for technical writers.

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