Desktop Application Nightmares

[BiffMaGriff]

Hello,
I am developing a destop application for a client that has a "tricked out" version of windows. Essentially they customised every single part of windows that they could.
Unfortunatly they insisted on having me develop my application as a desktop application and it has become a nightmare of discovering inconsistency after inconsistency where I have to manually set some setting to the default so that my application can run as if it was on a normal copy of XP.
So far I have found globalization issues, multithreading issues, and com issues.

Does anyone have a checklist of items I would be able to set for an application so that it could be run as if it were on a normal computer?

My dev box is very simple. XP Pro .Net 2.0 VS2005.

Thanks,
-Biff

[Plater]

I've never heard of customization settings affecting an application like you say.
What exactly did you have to do to overcome the obstacles so far?

[BiffMaGriff]

The worst problem I've had so far has been globalization issues.
The guy had this weird setting where if you tostringed any number it would result in a leading 1 being truncated. So it wasn't immediatly noticable until you got above 0.9.
I think I now put this line at the start of every application. (that isn't multicultured)

Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("en-US");

Solved that problem

I currently have no idea what is going on with multithreading on his computer. It blows up with dll issues with system.format or system.whatever it seems very random and bizzare. (I solved this one by removing the multithreading, user gets to watch the application hang)

And then for COM I am producing excel files. Most of it works except that when the app is run on his machine the equations are not beign written. I'm thinking he mucked up his excel install somehow. I wish I could just write xml files but of course the company uses Office 2000.

Of course com for excel needs one of these functions.

((xlTurnableObject)Excel.Application.xlSuckButton.settings(0)).Turn(xlDirection.Down, System.Reflection.Missing, System.Reflection.Missing, System.Reflection.Missing);

[Plater]

Could you just write a CSV file and them open/import it into excell (and re-save it)?

[BiffMaGriff]

Could you just write a CSV file and them open/import it into excell (and re-save it)?

Hmm, I didn't know that excel could interpret equations from csv files. Seems like that might just work.
However, I am still looking for global settings. I'm tired of writing work around after work around for this custom computer.