Usually whenever a program attempts to access DP4, and the DP4 system is not running, it will be automatically started (unless you chose to disable this feature). However this autoload may fail if DP4 is accessed via ODBC.
There are two main causes of this problem:
On Windows NT family operating systems DP4 is usually run as a service. Ordinary users do not generally have the right to start service programs, only power users and administrators can do so. Therefore the DP4 service may fail to start with an access denied error.
In fact it would be possible to configure a machine so that ordinary users could start the DP4 service as each service can have its own security information. An enhancement to create suitable security information will be added at some point.
Currently there are three possible work-arounds for this problem: either make sure DP4 users are power users or administrators,or modify the loader entry in the win32 section so that DP4 is run as an application rather than a service, or make sure DP4 is started automatically at system boot time.
DP4 may fail to start because srvw32 is not in the path. This problem is only likely to occur if DP4 is not run as a service (so always on Windows 9x/Me). Work-arounds are to ensure the directory for srvw32 is in the path or to modify the loader entry in the [win32] section to include full path information. This problem is fixed in DP4 Enterprise, as the autoload will automatically try to run the loader from the directory where odbclibt.dll is installed.