Terminal server--What if I get an error message?

First of all, don't panic. Some of these error messages occur because efforts to protect against viruses, trojan horses, and other malicious software also interfere with the normal operations of SPSS and Terminal Server. Here are some of the messages that I have encountered already with a brief explanation of what causes the message and how to work around it.

If you encounter an error message other than the ones described here, please contact me.

Administrator access message. I have never seen this message on my computer, but your computer might pop up a dialog box when you are trying to install terminal server that says something along the lines of you don't have sufficient access or permission or administrator privileges to run SPSS. When IS set up your computer, they added a security layer that protects you against malicious viruses and other computer threats but which also disables your ability to install software on your own. You need to call the help desk and they will temporarily grant you "king/queen for a day" privileges that will enable you to install your own programs for a limited time.

"The client software could not initialize with SPSS Server at ." When loading SPSS, I would get a dialog box that says: "The client software could not initialize with SPSS Server at ." The folks at SPSS told me the solution. "This is the result of either a missing or corrupted file named 'registry.txt' in the SPSS program folder. This problem can be fixed by either reinstalling SPSS or obtaining a new copy of that file from our FTP site and replace it with the one in your SPSS directory. That file is located at ftp://ftp.spss.com/pub/spss/windows. Please locate the one that's specific to your SPSS version." -- SPSS Web Support, personal communication, September 25, 2002.

"This action has been cancelled due to restrictions put on this computer." You should not be getting this error message anymore, but I am keeping it here just in case. This message is actually a paper tiger. What happened a while back is that someone was running terminal server from home and thought it would be fun to download some games to run on terminal server. You know what happened next, of course. Virus attack on terminal server! So our IS folks decided that they had to add some major security restrictions to terminal server. The restrictions interfere with some of the minor bookkeeping activities with SPSS as it starts up. Apparently when SPSS checks for a proper license, it touches a part of terminal server that raises a security flag. But whatever happens on terminal server stays on terminal server. If you click OK on the dialog box, everything in SPSS works just fine.

"Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access." At CMH, we have created an SPSS group for security reasons. If you are not part of the SPSS group, you cannot access SPSS and you will get an error message along the lines of the above. Call the help desk (5-3454) and ask to be added to the SPSS group. You may need to reboot your computer afterwards.

"You do not have sufficient access to your machine to connect to the selected printer."  This message appears when you are trying to get Terminal Server to recognize and print to your networked printer. This occurs when IS has not installed the appropriate printer drivers on terminal server. Tell me the brand name of your printer, and we can fix it from our end.

This webpage was written by Steve Simon on 2003-06-06, edited by Steve Simon, and was last modified on 2008-07-08. Send feedback to ssimon at cmh dot edu or click on the email link at the top of the page.