Sunday, September 21, 2008

Outdated mscomm32.ocx Error on Wine

I've been using MyPhoneExplorer to manage SMS, Contacts, and Calendar on my phone. Recently, I did a fresh install of Xubuntu Intrepid and discovered that MPE doesn't work. It gave me an error:

Run-time error '372':
Failed to load control 'MSComm' from MSCOMM32.OCX. Your version of MSCOMM32.OCX may be outdated. Make sure you are using the version of the control that was provided with your application.




This problem will occur only in Windows 95, 98, NT and 2000. You won't see it in Windows 98SE (Second Edition), Me, XP or Vista. The problem occurs because of a poor design decision that Microsoft made several years ago when they changed from the 16-bit to then-new 32-bit operating system. They've corrected the problem in the newest versions of Windows, but if you are running one of these older operating systems, you may possibly see the error. - AICS Research, Inc.

To fix this, you have to download a newer version of MSComm32.ocx and replace the one that you have installed on ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32

Rename the old MSCOMM32.OCX to MSCOMM32.OCX.bak just in case you need it in the future.

Download the files at:
http://www.dataq.com/support/downloads/mscomm32dotocx.zip

or at:
http://www.orbitfiles.com/download/id3289503534.html

Make sure the filename's all Uppercase (MSCOMM32.OCX) - you are, afterall, using Wine on Linux.

So there it is, I got my MPE and I hope you get to run your apps as well.