Ninja Trader, Windows Vista, and McAfee Security Center

[ridgesk@aol.com]

We wanted to share this info in the event others are experiencing the same as what we (husband is the trader, wife is the puter troubleshooter) went through in attempts to solve the source of our problems. When executing trades (both in sim and realtime) we were getting two separate popup error messages. The first: “Failed to execute db job orderupdate job: cannot open database. It may not be a database that your application recognizes, or the file may be corrupt”. The second (which appeared immediately following the first): Failed to execute db job orderupdatejob: operation must use an updateable query”.

We are running a new Dell dual core with Windows Vista. We were advised to reinstall NT. We did this several times. No help. We were advised that the Microsoft Jet Database Engine was corrupt, and given a link to the Microsoft website to reinstall it. Not do-able with Vista. We were advised to delete the .mdb files and re-build. No help. We were told that our Microsoft NET Framework was out of date and needed to be corrected. We had the current version… no help. We were asked to send our log and trace files which contained these error messages. No help.

Unable to risk trading under these error conditions, we decided to revert our Windows Vista OS back to XP. Went out and bought the new OS, but in researching the potential difficulties and invalidation of our Dell warranty, we sat on this project for a few days. Found a programming website that described these errors as being “permissions” related. Since I installed NT on our system using the Administrative User, I knew that this couldn’t be related to our problems. Went into our McAfee Security center and verified that NT was a “trusted” site for both inbound and outbound access, so this wasn’t it either. As a last resort, I completely disabled all functions of McAfee Security Center (this is the firewall, virus protection, etc) software that was shipped with our Dell. And poof… FINALLY, no errors.

Bottom line… uninstall McAfee if you experience these messages. We are posting this rather long novel because the nice folks at NT Support, who spent a LOT of overhead with us were unable to point us in the right direction. Neither was our broker able to give us any answers. Ninja Trader works perfectly with Vista, once you get rid of McAfee. We have now installed AVG Free for virus protection, and a router-based firewall for stealth. Good luck trading! Mike and Karen

[PhilS]

AVG is a great package! An alternative is Microsoft Live OneCare. Have been running Vista and NT 6 - 6.5.4, using IB as data/backend, on two different workstations successfully for many months. If you have system problems, consider disabling Vista's User Account Control re: permissions as another source of conflict with chatrooms/datafeeds.

[ridgesk@aol.com]

Thanks Phil. GREAT info. Will check it out.

[NinjaTrader_Dierk]

Thanks for sharing that info. And sorry for the trouble you went through...