AutoHotkey Community

[ranomore]

This is really obscure, I promise.
So, the IT department where I work moved to a Distributed File System (DFS). Basically it makes server links dynamic, so a UNC name like \\Company\Folder can be linked to \\ServerA\folder or \\ServerB\otherfolder, without the end-user ever knowing about it. It's a pretty cool feature, but Win98 doesn't get a long well with it.

However, there is a client Win98 users can run to make their PC play nice with DFS (then, of course, there was a hotfix to the client, cause it wasn't really that great). Anyway, some AHK commands work after the client hotfixes are installed on the Win98 box, and some don't.

An example of a working command:
FileGetVersion

Non-working (at least I think it is)
Run

It's hard to duplicate, I know, but hopefully a difference is visible between how FileGetVersion executes and how Run does.

If it helps any, the Run command won't work on a direct UNC name, or on a mapped drive, like W:\. (I can, however, use Win+R to run the program from the mapped drive, although I can't do it via the UNC name.)

[Chris]

The run command tries to launch the specified application using CreateProcess(). If that fails, it then tries ShellExecuteEx(). Because of this, you could try specifying a more explicit path or name when launching to see if that helps -- under the theory that it would allow CreateProcess to work. For example, rather than launching a document directly, you could run its associated application and pass the document name as the first parameter.

If you want to try research it at the API level, you could use DllCall to call CreateProcess() or ShellExecute() directly. But if you've never used these functions it would probably take considerable time to get comfortable with them.

[ranomore]

[Chris]

Although MSDN doesn't say it, I think that means that the W version of ShellExecute() requires Microsoft Layer for Unicode. AutoHotkey uses the A version (ANSI).

By the way, AutoHotkey actually uses ShellExecuteEx(), but the distinction probably doesn't matter for this topic.