catalog information cannot be retrieved

[William LaMartin]

On a new laptop with Windows XP Professional, Visual Studio .Net 2003,
Visual Basic 6, Delphi 6, Microsoft Office Pro 2002 installed, I have just
noticed the following problem.

If I put an ADO data control on a form in VB 6 and try to build the
connection string property in the properties window I get the error: "Login
failed. Catalog information cannot be retrieved." If I click about 16 or 17
times on the reoccurring warning window's Ok button, then everything is set
up ok.

I can recreate the problem more simply as follows:

If I create a new text document and rename it test.udl, and then right-click
a select properties, I can then set the Provider as Microsoft Jet 4.0 OLE DB
Provider. But when I build a connection string pointing to an Access
database, I get the error "Login failed. Catalog information cannot be
retrieved."

I thought it might be a problem, so I downloaded MDAC 2.7 from Microsoft and
installed. I then used their MDAC version checker to verify that I had. I
then when and got the latest version of Jet 4.0 and installed it.

Still the problem persists. I think I have seen this problem before but
can't recall the solution.

What is the solution?

[William LaMartin]

The problem is solved. Unbelievably a Kensington mouse driver installed by
a recent Windows update caused the problem. Once I rolled back the driver
to the standard Microsoft one, everything was fine.

It is truly remarkable that a mouse driver could cause such a problem.

"William LaMartin" <lama...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote in message
news:OLZlJxJ...@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...

[Sid]

William LaMartin wrote:
> The problem is solved. Unbelievably a Kensington mouse driver
installed by
> a recent Windows update caused the problem. Once I rolled back the
driver
> to the standard Microsoft one, everything was fine.
>
> It is truly remarkable that a mouse driver could cause such a
problem.
>

I want to report the same problem and solution with a little additional
data.

First of all the "catalog information cannot be retrieved error"
occurred whether the UDL was pointing to Microsoft Access or Oracle.
For Oracle, it did not matter if the driver was Oracle's native driver
or the Microsoft OLE/DB driver for Oracle.

I had the Kensington "Expert Mouse" installed through a KVM [Keyboard,
Video, Mouse] switch connected to a Windows 2000 machine and a Windows
XP machine. The Kensington mouse driver was installed on both
machines. I can't remember if it was manually installed on WinXP or if
WinXP just recognized the type of mouse. In any case, the MDAC/ADO/UDL
problem "catalog information cannot be retrieved" did not occur on the
WinXP machine, only the W2K one. So I only had to deinstall the mouse
driver on the W2K machine.

This is certainly a weird problem.