Microsoft Releases a Vista patch for Delphi 7 support in Vista

ooohhh, I just love this… It’s funny, but won’t be for anyone uninstalling Delphi 7 in order to install Delphi 2007. 

 Just look at the description from one of the linked articles:

After you remove a program from your computer, you can no longer access the CD drive or the DVD drive successfully. The CD drive or the DVD drive does not appear. Or, you receive an error message when you try to access the drive. – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060/

Isn’t that just cool?  Uninstall a program from a Vista machine and boom: No CD Drive for you! 

Now, Microsoft is a bit vague, so I could be extrapulating too much information from the articles linked to from this topic.  In Microsoft’s language they only say “This update also includes fixes that are contained in update 929427. These fixes improve support in Windows Vista for the following applications: ”  And then it lists a bunch of programs including CDs and multimedia apps and in the very middle is “Delphi 7 Professional”.   If anyone else can find more details on the exact issue, I’ll gladely update this article.

The patch is a bit of a mixed bag since installing the patch can produce problems:

Note After you install this update, a CD device or a DVD device may not work correctly. If you select the device in Device Manager and then view the properties for the device, you may receive the following error message:

The software for this device has been blocked from starting because it is known to have problems with Windows. Contact the hardware vendor for a new driver. (Code 48)

This problem occurs because a legacy application may install drivers that are incompatible with Windows Vista.

It is when you go digging into the issue through 314060  that you can see the symptoms of the problem Microsoft is dancing around:

In Microsoft Windows XP, after you remove a CD recording program or a DVD recording program, or after you remove a different program, you experience the following symptoms:

•	You cannot access the CD drive or the DVD drive by using My Computer.
•	One of the following error messages appears when you view the CD drive or the DVD drive in Device Manager:Error message 1 The device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device (Code 31). Error message 2 A driver for this device was not required, and has been disabled (Code 32 or Code 31). Error message 3 Your registry might be corrupted. (Code 19)
•	You receive an “error code 39” error message.
•	A message that resembles the following appears in the notification area: Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device. (Code 41)

 Delphi 2007 must be in the very helpful “or after you remove a different program” part. 😉

 Anyway the fix is part of the March 2007 Vista update: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/932246