To all W4NH band captains and users of Writelog >>

An anomaly was discovered late last night and confirmed today during station setup at W4ZST’s house. It appears to be linked to a recent (not identified yet) MicroSoft update and NOT an issue caused by any particular version of WL. However, it DOES appear to affect ALL versions of Writelog we have used….including V11.11.

IF YOU HAVE NOT ALLOWED YOUR WRITELOG  PC TO PERFORM A MS UPDATE WITHIN THE PAST MONTH, DISABLE ALL FURTHER UPDATES IMMEDIATELY UNTIL WE HAVE MORE INFO ON THE CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM !  

Failure mode > Recording .wav files

Writelog appears to function normally except when attempting to record a new .wav file now. WL will play previously recorded and saved .wav files as normal. But when a new .wav file is recorded the mic is muted during record even though a .wav file is stored in the proper folder. 

It was confirmed during multiple experimentation and debug today that this is NOT an issue with .wav file playback or recorded .wav files being stored in different folder locations (as we have experienced in the past during simple WL version upgrades)  

To confirm, a suspect recorded file was copied to another PC and Windows media player was used to confirm it contained no digital voice. Then a known good file was transferred from a functioning WL machine, and placed in the WL  .wav file folder of the machine in question. That .wav file played normally when F2 was pressed. So playback set up is fine.

All audio setup screens, soundcard parameters, and various audio mixer screens of BOTH Windows XP and Writelog have been explored with no success. The only hint visibly seen is a window within the WL audio mixer screen that shows the mic being muted. Un-Checking the Mute box lasts only until a Shift-F2 is performed to record a message. At that point, the mic appears to go muted again !!  

This has now been observed on 3 different WL computers recently allowed to do a MS update, including a computer running WL 10.65 used successfully for the past 7 W4NH VHF contests. It too, is now “broken” !

Even when a computer is “rolled back” to a previous version of Windows XP the situation is not corrected. It just appears that some recent MS update has modified something in a WL initialization file.

My next step the next few days is to uninstall my WL 11.11, allow the PC to receive all MS updates once again, then attempt to re-install WL V 11.11 to see if the problem is corrected.

This particular PC was the one that I began with back in Oct. with a fresh hard drive, fresh install of XP, and full install of WL V 11.11. The box has been running flawlessly and everything in WL installed cleanly and worked well…..until last night when doing a final test before contest in 2 weeks.

Stay tuned for more updates !

Ron

WW8RR