The dreaded Internal Error error meets the dreaded Adobesupport, sigh

[Ken Stitzel]

THANK YOU to the longsuffering Emily for raising the topic and to
everyone who responded to her plea with helpful suggestions. I, too,
have labored under the same massively frustrating problem. Adobe support
had a few suggestions but was largely a useless ineffective joke. The
problem kept recurring, leaving me in hot water with my boss and dead in
the water when trying to meet critical deadlines. AUGH!

What finally SEEMS to have fixed the problem for me (crossing fingers,
knocking on wood, hoping that Murphy's Law will not now extract a
horrible vengeance) is the suggestion about deleting the FNTCACHE.DAT
file in the C:\i386 and C:\WINDOWS\system32 folders. I haven't figured
out a way to automate this yet, but I did create some shortcuts to the
relevant directories so I can Eradicate the Evil Badness when necessary.

Perhaps others can benefit from the key lessons of my saga of agony:

* The suggestion about going to "Generate Acrobat Data", ticking the
"Generate Tagged PDF" box, and removing most of the objects to tag did
not ever prevent the error/crash for me. However, it does seem to be
good practice to reduce overhead in the PDF generation process.  

* Adobe's suggestion that I save everything as MIF and then reopen it
worked with some books but not others--plus the Internal Error happened
even with Frame files that had never used imported Word files. Clearly,
this is an inconvenient and time-consuming process if you've got a lot
of documents. (I didn't try to automate it since it never fixed the
crash problem.) On the plus side, I think I will use this process
whenever I first import Word documents into Frame, since it seems to
remove some potential problems left over from the conversion. 

* Reinstalling FrameMaker worked, sort of--except that it would only
work for a while before the problem returned, and it didn't work unless
I reinstalled Frame AND Acrobat AND all the latest patches. That's quite
a time-sink by the time you perform both reinstalls and download the
latest patches. (Adobe's servers can run quite slowly during the day). I
think this approach worked only because it got rid of--or temporarily
changed--the FNTCACHE.DAT file, which would then would return in an Evil
form at some point and crash the whole works all over again.

* Installing Ixgen with Frame 8 brought the Internal Error back. I'm
hoping this is again because of the FNTCACHE.DAT file, and that I can
get Ixgen to work with Frame 8 eventually. When I'm feeling brave
between deadlines, I'll try again.

* I tried rolling my system back to Frame 7.2 and Acrobat 6, both of
which had worked flawlessly in tandem for more than a year. But, in a
fit of apparent Evil, Adobe saw fit to lobotomize earlier versions of
Acrobat after I had once installed Acrobat 8. Great strategy for making
me feel hostile toward Adobe and extremely suspicious of all of their
software and updates. Thanks, guys.

It sucks that Adobe broke its own software so badly, putting so many
through software agony while just trying to do their jobs. I hope this
particular tale of woe ends for one and all--or that at least we all
have some decent workarounds in our respective arsenals.

Kendal Stitzel

SkyeTek, Inc. (making the physical digital with RFID--or at least trying
to via my tech docs)