VP/ix woes

[Steve Kirkendall]

I installed VP/ix for a friend yesterday.  Today we tried to use it.  Yikes!
I sure hope I goofed during the installation, because if its SUPPOSED to work
this way then he just wasted $400 and made some promises he won't be able to
keep.

If the symptoms that I'm about to describe sound familiar, *PLEASE* reply.
I would really like to know whats going on here.

We're running SCO UNIX on a Wyse 3016sx with 3 megabytes of RAM, a VGA card,
and very little else.  No unusual hardware.  If we avoid VP/ix, UNIX seems to
work okay.

When we use VP/ix, the floppy drives become instruments of death.  A simple
"copy a:*.*" has caused VP/ix to seize up several times, and it has caused
the whole UNIX system to crash twice now.  When it doesn't seize up or crash
UNIX, it will frequently give "not ready" errors, or other I/O errors.
Sometimes it'll work if you hit <r> for "Retry".

The DOS version of Word Perfect 5.0 can't read a directory on the H: "drive".
He'd like to install his applications in subdirectories hanging off his home
directory, but WP kept telling us about "error 258".  So we installed it on
the C: drive and it works there.

We tried playing a golf game, and it froze on the title screen -- which appears
after several setup screens, including one that selects the proper graphics
mode.  <Control><Alt><Delete> doesn't work there (probably not VP/ix's fault)
so we switched over to a UNIX screen and killed the vpix process.

On the other hand, XTPRO works like a champ.  It can even display a directory
tree for the U: drive -- the entire UNIX filesystem.

My friend is selling an application that will run under UNIX, and he'd like to
tell potential customers that they will still be able to run their DOS
applications.  He's told that to a few of them already.

Some specific questions: Is VP/ix more reliable under SCO Xenix? Or Interactive
UNIX?  Is anybody out there happy with VP/ix?

	This has been a very frightening day.
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Steve Kirkendall     kirkenda at cs.pdx.edu      Grad student at Portland State U.