Symptoms

Shortly after starting SPEED Ferret, the message 'Run-time error 52: Bad file name or number' is displayed. After you click the OK button to dismiss the dialog box, SPEED Ferret exits.

Cause

The projects, searches, and other objects that you create in the SPEED Ferret workspace are stored in a folder called the SPEED Ferret Data Store. The data store is normally created the first time that you run SPEED Ferret.

In accordance with Microsoft's guidelines, SPEED Ferret places its data store in your personal documents folder (My Documents). In order to determine the location of this folder on your system, SPEED Ferret calls the SHGetFolderPath function provided by Microsoft.

SHGetFolderPath normally returns a path such as C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents. But on some systems SHGetFolderPath returns a root-level directory path such as F:\. This causes SPEED Ferret to construct a malformed path specification, because SPEED Ferret incorrectly assumes that the path returned by SHGetFolderPath will never end with a backslash (\) character.

Solution

Download the latest update to SPEED Ferret 4.0 from our downloads page.