My Talking Communities Story: "Technical Support That Shines"

[CaliforniaJerry]

Talking Communities is a web-based conference room. Lynn Terry uses it for her SSWT Webinars.

I'd been having trouble logging in to Lynn's webinars for the last couple weeks, and now that her new group is forming, I wanted to be sure I could attend the Webinars. So it was time to finally address this issue head-on.

I was having difficulty getting the software to work properly on my machine, and I was unable to login or even get the login screen to appear.

I wrote to tech support (on Monday) and received an answer (on Tuesday) that did not resolve the issue.

They provide a phone number on their site, so I gave tech support a call. That was on Wednesday. I was told to leave a message and I did so. I mentioned that I had a conference to be on the next day. I called again and left another message on the "Sales" line.

I received three calls yesterday, the same day, Wednesday. One from the original tech support agent (Clyde), one from the software manager (Steve), and one from the owner & CEO (George).

George and Steve stayed on the phone with me for two hours while we went through every possible scenario as to why this was giving me trouble. They were concerned that others might be having the same problem. Finally, we found it. It turned out to be a corrupt Microsoft Windows dynamic link library file (.dll) and it had required using their special debug tools to discover this.

How's that for tech support, eh?

Now the software works fine, and I'll see you on the next webinar!

[TraciKnoppe]

That's awesome!!! Yep, see you on the webinar later today.

[angienewton]

Jerry,
That is so great they could help you find the problem! See you later today for the elite webinar. YEA!

[CaliforniaJerry]

Hi Traci and Angie,

[Update: It's not a virus, in fact it was ESET NOD32 anti-virus program causing the problem.]

Turns out it's "could be" a virus on my machine that is preventing the executable from running. So, unfortunately I was not able to join you this morning. In fact Clyde spent another 1-1/2 hours with me to try different things. There is a GDI.DLL that seems to be getting corrupted, so I'll have to research that on Google or Microsoft's knowledge base. Plus, the .exe file won't even download to my machine. It just gets deleted. It's very mysterious.

I'll be running my anti-virus and anti-spyware programs during the next couple nights to see what they turn up.

I'll update here as soon as I know anything further.

[angienewton]

Sounds like a plan, Jerry. Sure hope it all gets worked out. Computer issues like that are no fun at all.

[KarenMcG]

Wow, Jerry.

I'm sorry to learn you've had so much difficulty getting connected and up and running so you could join in on the teleconference calls.

But how is cool is that that you had the "big guys" helping you resolve your issue. Well, sort of resolve it. At least now you know what the problem isn't!

Good luck. With your tenacity and their input, you'll eventually get it figured out.

[CaliforniaJerry]

The Talking Communities developers made a minor change and the program seems to be working now. I did have to stop using ESET NOD32 anti-virus program to install the software. I'm not sure if it's still a conflict or not. But I've switched to Webroot anti-virus, anti-spyware (SpySweeper), and email scanner, so that seems to be working well.

The program still crashes when Lynn navigates to certain pages in the webinar browser. I've mentioned this to the TC developers and perhaps it will be resolved sometime soon.

[lindastacy]

Sorry I missed this thread before. I haven't been to a Tuesday webinar in a while because I suddenly could no longer connect. I also use ESET, but I'm sure I previously participated in webinars while using it. It may be something that changed with an ESET upgrade though. I seem to recall that there was also a webinar script update just before this happened.

I did connect once using a work-around. At the bottom of the webinar log in page there's a link to click for a "page cannot be displayed" error solution. I modified that link to the correct path to the program on my hard drive and was able to participate.

I'll likely try again in the fall when I'm back to my more normal schedule so hopefully I'll see you there!

The issue for me was that every time I clicked the link to enter the webinar.... sorry... now I don't even remember for sure.... either the program would ask me to download and install or just automatically go to the download again.