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Strange Error Messages and Unhelpful Help

Some interesting error messages and unhelpful help that readers have come across.

Sometimes you get singularly unhelpful help or error messages.  Here’s some we and our readers have found recently … 

William Ferry reports the following weird error message, which occurs whenever he boots his laptop running Win NT Workstation:

“The control registers for COM2 overlaps with the COM2 control registers.”

followed two lines later by

“While validating that COM2 was really a serial port, the contents of the divisor latch register was identical to the interrupt enable and the receive registers. The device is assumed not to be a serial port and will be deleted.”





I have gotten this strange error message several times, on opening a Word merge document with an Access table as its data source:

“Microsoft Access was unable to create the Database window.  Please upgrade to a newer version of Microsoft Internet Explorer.”

 Funny, I already have the latest version of IE!

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