MAS has encountered a problem

Written by Todd Martin on .

Don't you just love it when you get a generic error message saying your system encountered a problem and needs to close. We recently ran into such an error. The image below is what it looked like. It would appear a few seconds after logging into Sage 100.

MAS Encountered a problem and needs to close

At least they were polite and told us that they were sorry for the inconvenience but it would have been nice if they would have told me why the error happened. This error would show every time the user would log into Sage 100. The user would click close and continue to work in the system without any noticeable issues.

This all happened after installing a service update for version 4.4. It was hard to troubleshoot the since there were no errors in the log stating that this happened or why it happened. No error number or debug information.  

We started to notice that, on occasions, there would be another error shortly after the first error. It did have a little more information and did not appear to be from Sage 100. Instead it appeared to be from the operating system. The error was an Application Error "Exception EAccessViolation in module PVXIO.DLL at 00016866." The only option we had was to click ok. Again when we would click OK the system continued to work without any noticeable issues.

Exception EAccessViolation PVXIO.dll

Now we really had a mystery with this support case and we were left scratching our heads. So I bet at this time you are wondering what it was. What could it be that caused this error? The reason this customer was getting this error was due to an error with a new feature that Sage put in the product update to get feedback from the end users. It is called Sage Product Enhancement Program or PEP. It started to be shipped with version 4.5 but they have added it to 4.4 with a service update. 

While we are unsure as to what PEP was doing that caused this error, more than likely it was missing files or data, we were able to get around the issue. If you log in as administrator you can change the setting to not participate in the PEP program. This keeps the PEP from running and in our case it fixed the error.

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90 Minds
90 Minds Consulting Group is an 
association of proactive consulting professionals who combine technology skills while still operating their own independent companies.

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