Church Helpmate 2010 under Windows 10

imageOur church uses Church Helpmate 2010 for contribution accounting. I’m the contributions secretary, and I run a copy of the software at home to do reports. Things were working smoothly until I installed Windows 10 on my home system and Helpmate stopped working.

As part of installing Windows 10, I had to re-install Microsoft Office Professional 2013 and I think that latter item caused my problem. The symptom was an error message about “registry permissions” followed by an offer to repair the problem. I ran the repair, but the problem persisted, and afterwards any attempt to start the program resulted in an installation dialog that appeared briefly and then closed.

In order to fix this problem I used the Windows uninstaller to remove both Church Helpmate 2010 AND the Microsoft Access 2002 runtime. I also deleted a folder (maybe unnecessarily) C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Sagekey Software. After that I re-installed Church Helpmate from media.

That fixed it and all is working again.

Update:

I installed Office 365, which at this point is Office 2016. I had the same problem with HelpMate and the same solution worked. Helpmate is a Microsoft Access application integrally tied to the Access 2002 runtime. Somehow that runtime is damaged by the Office installation (which includes the current version of Access).

I recently learned that the latest version, HelpMate 2015, is built on Access 2o10. That might work better.

Update 2:

We upgraded to HelpMate 2015. The biggest surprise is now utterly similar it looks, the main changes being graphic icons instead of words on buttons. The big internal change is the built-in PDF creator which is hugely better. Also, the Access 2010 run-time avoids some of the previous problems with broken updates for the older version of Access.

I was concerned about the Office 365 refusal to allow concurrent older versions of Office on the same computer. This appears not to be the case with the run-time version of Access.

About Kevin

Just an old guy with opinions that I like to bounce off other people.
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