Unknown Error Creating Demo Company

This is another mea culpa post; I’ve been doing enough of them I’m thinking of giving them their own tag.

I was created a virtual machine with the Fabrikam, Inc. demo company in it. When GP Utilities was processing I got this error pop up;

It took me a few minutes of fiddling before I realised that this error was entirely my fault. When I’d first created the ODBC System DSN I’d called it Dynmaics GP and had spotted it while starting GP Utilities but rather than doing the sensible thing of cancelling GP Utilities, renaming the ODBC and then restarting GP Utilities, I’d just started GP Utiltities and left the error.

Knowing the spelling mistake was there nagged and nagged at me until I decided to go ahead and rename the ODBC even while GP Utilities was processing. I made the assumption (and I’m sure we all know what assumptions are) that once it was logged in that changing the ODBC would have no impact; however, as evidenced by the error message, it does have an impact.

Fortunately this was only a demo system (and I would never have done this on a live system; when dealing with clients data I am paranoid about making backups before touching anything and am always apologising for it) and once GP Utilities was closed and reopened it ran through to completion, picking up where it had left off when crashing.