I ran into very strange situation with Crystal Reports XI recently. Basiclly, after going File –> Open and choosing a file, Crystal would come to a screeching halt. 5 minutes, 45 minutes, still NOTHING happening…. so I fired up the old task manger and killed my dear friend Crystal.
To make a long story short…. neither I nor Business Objects tech support could figure out what was going on….. that was until I tried to work at home that night on my laptop and BANG the same thing almost happened…. Almost?….. Yes This time I got an “This Report Uses an Invalid Printer” Dialog Box.
Eureeka!
I realize what had happened in my IT universe…..
1.) An OLD Windows 2003 member server had been decommissioned over the prior weekend. This used to be a print server.
2.) The OLD print server had a static DNS entry which was never deleted.
Because Many of the Crystal Reports in my production environment are very old, They were designed using a printer from that old server as the default printer! Crystal was VERY determined to find that printer (obviously a bug!). As soon as I deleted the static DNS entry and then flushed the DNS cache on my workstation. I was able to fire up Crystal and open the report.
2 Morals in this story:
1.) Don’t use Static DNS entries in Win 2K3, unless it’s for something that can’t register itself with DNS.
(this one predated me and I can’t figure out why it may have been put in there. )
2.) Don’t design Crystal Reports with Default Printers unless you really have to. They have that File–> Page Setup –> No Printer option for a reason!
