Hello Neville,
I thought I would reply on this thread in case other users experience the same issues I did!
Just to reiterate, my problem was Pastel stopped showing companies after an upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1.
I followed the steps given in the email and could not make it work. I just got a new error 'Runtime error 76. File not found'.
Back to square 1.
We are operating in a domain environment so I thought I would just check if it was a user profile issue or a machine issue as it was only one person affected.
Step 1: I logged in on the problem machine as a different user and tried it and it worked. Therefore the machine probably not the issue.
Step 2: I logged in as the problem user on another machine and created a new profile and it worked.
Therefore I deducted that the local user profile on the problem machine was corrupted and set about removing it. Problem solved or so I thought. But there's more!
I logged in as another user then browsed to C:\Users\person_x and tried to delete the profile but it would not completely remove it. Enabled hidden files and finally got the folder to disappear.
But every time I logged in as that user again it would not create a new profile from scratch ("hi, we're settings things up for you etc etc") as I expected. Instead it would log on and say welcome, then open with a message that it had set up a temporary profile. After much Google searching I came across a thread that showed how to delete the remnants of a user profile from the registry. Once I did this it worked.
I logged in as the problem user and it set up a new profile, and Pastel is working fine now.
The location of the user profiles in the registry is:
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Win dows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
When you click on any profile, the details of what profile it is are listed in the main right hand window. That way I could find the offending profile and delete it, thus forcing it to create a new one. A point to note here is the offending one will most likely be a *.bak file which is the problem. It cannot open the profile in this format. The downside of this is you lose your profile and any saved preferences if you delete the profile but in my case it was the only option.
I have trained my staff not to have too many personal preferences or quirky setups for this very reason that things happen! They now accept that if they want it, they set it up again if I need to delete it for whatever reason (new machine is a classic example).