Required: Adobe Air

Got this message from an offline field user:
“This application requires a version of Adobe AIR which cannot be found. Please download the latest version of the runtime from http://www.adobe.com/go/getair, or contact the application author for an updated version.”

The user notes that HT is still generally functioning but just complaining of Adobe Air.

Is Adobe Air required for HT? If so, what version? Or is this message due to the user being offline for an extended period of time and just an annoying message to the user to update Adobe Air?

Hi @Tyler_Hewitt,
HearThis has no relationship whatsoever to Adobe Air.

I’ll second what JohnH says. But some other piece of SIL software could be causing this message to pop up. Does the message indicate the name of the software or appear to be “modal”, i.e., blocking the user from interacting with some piece of software until the message is dismissed? Or does it just appear as a “toast” message in the lower right corner of the screen? The most likely culprit is RAMP. But any SIL software that include a reference to the SIL.Archiving DLL could potentially be causing that message to pop up, since the archiving code has hooks into RAMP, which communicates with REAP via Adobe Air. FieldWorks and SayMore are the two programs I know of that use SIL.Archving, but there could be others.

Thank you Tom. The user replies with the following:

When the message pops up, we can’t do anything until it is dismissed which totally paralyzes the national recorders since they don’t know English and they don’t know if this one they can just get rid of or if this is the one that crashes the machine and causes me to manually restart and delete the offending block/wav file that has everything locked up.

This is why the message is a pain.

I don’t have Field Works or Saymore on those machines. I don’t get that message generally on my win 10 machine, but only on the Win7 ones, but I will keep watching for it again on mine.

By “we can’t do anything”, do you mean in HearThis, or do you mean the entire machine is locked up waiting for you to respond to the message? Does the message have a caption/title that indicates anything further about the context (e.g., what program it is coming from)? If/when it happens again, if you are able, maybe you can check in Task Manager to see what else is running that could be responsible for the message. If it is hanging HearThis, but everything else on the machine is still able to run, then something truly bizarre is going on. In that case, maybe you could try uninstalling HearThis and re-installing from a freshly downloaded copy of the latest version. At this point, my best guess is that there is some malware on the machine that is trying to get you to download Adobe AIR because it wants to exploit a vulnerability in it.