After running Crystal Reports 8.5 via Virtual machine for many years, our new management asked me being the company's Computer Consultant, to upgrade a laptop to Crystal Reports 2013. I ran into many obstacles which delayed this project for weeks due to my extremely limited hours, and matching schedules with our only Crystal Reports user left as I know little about the program, other than having been shown the ODBC driver configuration years ago our networking company provided me.
After getting around problems such as updating the user from Windows XP to 7, needing to downgrading Win7 to the 32 version due to our
older "ProvideX" ODBC driver, Crystal Reports 2013 seemed to work fine on the Friday it was finally installed. That same evening I installed 6 Windows security updates on our Windows 2003 R2 Server as I've done for years. When employees came back Monday, they noticed a font problem with our custom database.
Crystal 2013 ran great all day Friday, Monday & Tuesday. Tuesday evening our networking company asked me to install 2 updates on the server to correct the font problem. One of them was "WindowsServer2003-KB3013455x86ENU" On Wednesday it was reported the font issue was cleared up, but Crystal Reports has not been able to correctly extract data ever since. Even worse, it no longer works in the older virtual machine either that ran for years. I've been installing Windows security updates for many years without problems. I had the programmer from the networking company that showed me how to configure the ODBC years ago take a look at it, and he could not figure it out either. I saw no mention of that update in Windows updates on the Server or in the Add/Remove programs. The problem seems to be something bottle-necking the communication when you run reports in Crystal. It attempts to get the information from our Server via ODBC to Crystal, runs very slow and then finally gives up.