Computers always seem to know when something is time critical, and choose that moment to cause trouble.  In our case this was a client with an external accountant.  The accountant had come into the office to perform the VAT returns for the following day and Sage reported it needed an update.  “Click here to check for updates” it read.  However when they clicked the unhelpful response was “No updates available”.  That is when they called Greenfrog and the tale begins…….

(If you are an IT technician with a similar problem we hope the tale below will save you lots of time.  Skip to 12:32 and you’ll be done in 5 minutes )

(If you are an end user in need of help please call! )

(If you have trouble getting to sleep please feel free to print this out and put on your bedside table)

Time Log (Time of Day)

10:03 – Login to the sage website and manually download the customer’s version of Sage Line 50

10:18 – Run the update but this fails with “the specified account already exists”

10:23 – Place a call to Sage tech support who point us to the public download http://sage.co.uk/au which has newer software than the customer portal (!!)

10:35 – Run this however it also fails with “the specified account already exists”, adding ODBC x64 returned code 0x80070643

11:03 – The accountant is getting desperate.  Try to update just that one machine – it now reports it needs to update the Sage Data Service and offers to download it.  Click “OK” but this just closes the installer without doing anything.

11:10 – Phone Sage tech support again – they say the data service referred to is on the server not this workstation so install it there

11:14 – Tried to install onto the server but it refuses as there are server reboots pending.  Reboot the server

11:18 – Server rebooted and installation underway….

11:29 – …however this fails with exactly the same error

11:30 – Contact Sage tech support for the third time.  They run the installer directly from the %temp%\sageaccounts\V24Update2 folder, but the same error comes up.  They refer to their specialist team

11:55 – The specialist team say this is not a Sage issue but an issue with Microsoft .net and point us to article http://www.sage.co.uk/asksage/viewarticle.asp?p_faqid=39849&DIV=SBD.  This tells us to uninstall .NET 4.6, then .NET 3.5 and then reinstall.

12:17 – The uninstall/reinstall is complete.  Rerun the Sage update but this fails with exactly the same error.

12:32 – We notice that in the %temp%\sageaccounts\V24Update2 folder is a further folder called “patches”.  In here are small files one of which is dataaccess.msi which updates just the sage data service.  We run this and the client can now connect

12:39 – Run the Client part of the patch on the user’s workstation and this brings Sage up to a working state.  Rang the accountant who is delighted she can now start doing the work scheduled for 2 1/2 hours ago.