Problems associating PT9 project with FieldWorks 8 project while FW9 also installed

Question

I installed FW9 and 8 on the same system as I was supporting students using both versions. In Paratext now I’m having difficulty making my project associate with the Fieldworks project that it was formerly associated with and I’m wondering if I’m doing something wrong. Paratext seemed to prefer the FW9 project folder (in the registry as Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIL\FieldWorks\9…) but my project isn’t there rather in the Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIL\FieldWorks\8 location. So I renamed the Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SIL\FieldWorks\9 key to be something totally different and it cleverly finds the Fieldworks 8 project but then when I choose the project it complains that it can’t use that version of the project. FW8 is 8.3.12.

So my question is whether I’ve done something wrong or whether Paratext 9 requires Fieldworks 9, or indeed whether the fact my project drive is on a network drive (actually it is virtual network drive provided by my virtual machine) is causing the trouble.

Answer 1

Paratext uses the FIELDWORKSDIR environment variable to look for FieldWorks. If that environment variable is not there, then it will only look for the FW8 registry key and ignore everything else. So renaming that FW9 key didn’t really do anything on the Paratext end, it must have done something to FW that then caused the error message you got (which came from FW, not Paratext).

Answer 2

Thanks. I asked because I couldn’t work out where Paratext was looking.