Symptoms

• When a customer loads a Ponemah data set, the receive an "Unhandled Exception" error message. 

And

• The customer is using the MS Office 2003 ODBC file format in Ponemah and Windows 7 64-bit.

Problem

The issue is related to the ODBC file format the customer is using (Microsoft Office 2003, XLS) and Windows 7 64-bit. For Neuroscore, or any application that parses MS Office 2003 or Access 2003 files, the application will attempt to access a Microsoft ODBC driver that supports that version of MS Office. Unfortunately, the 2003 version is no longer supported by Microsoft. The necessary driver to parse the 2003 file format is contained in Windows 7, but it’s not 64-bit compatible. This means 64-bit applications (like Neuroscore) that need to use the driver can’t.

Workarounds

1. In the future, the user should change the Ponemah ODBC file format to MS Office 2007+.

2. The user can downgrade their Windows 7 installation to Windows 7 32-bit.

3. The user can attempt to install the most recent 64-bit ODBC driver that is packaged with Office 2010+. This will actually recognize the older format and still let things work.  the driver is called the Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 Redistributable.  It can be downloaded from the following link:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13255

Upon clicking Download, you will need to check the box next to AccessDatabaseEngine_x64.exe and click Next. The download should start automatically.

4. The user can delete the .XLS file for the data set generated by Ponemah.

Problems with Workaround #3

If the customer has the 32-bit version of Office 2007 – Office 2013 installed on their system, the driver mentioned above can’t be installed.  Microsoft does not allow the 32-bit ODBC driver and 64-bit ODBC drivers to be installed at the same time.  When trying to install the redistributable above, the installer will inform you if it detects any 32-bit versions of Office or the 32-bit ODBC driver and prevent you from installing it. If it does not detect this, it should install successfully.

Problems with Workaround #4

Deleting the .XLS file for the data set will prevent the customer from being able to open and work with any of the derived data that was contained in the .XLS file.  This may not be acceptable for some customers.  They may want to have the derived data in Neuroscore to help with their analysis.