I upgraded to Metastock Pro yesterday. The installation seemed to be fine and when I opened it I didn't notice any problems. However today when I try to open Metastock it gives me the error message "Unknown Error # :-83" and will not open. Any ideas what I can do to solve the problem?

On other thread Justin posted a potential solution below. However my system (Vista) doesn't appear to have this problem. However if I try to start the AST as described it says "Error 2 The system cannot find the file specified". Is this normal or does it indicate a problem?

I'm a little lost with no working version of Metastock at the moment.

Error 83

This error can occur any time the AST Service cannot start. This error seems specific to 10.1c. Open the Services section of Windows (Start-->Run-->Services.MSC) and double click on the AST Service. Make sure the Startup Type is set to Automatic and that the Path to Executable is set correctly. Sometimes the Path to Executable will have two backslashes in the path, i.e. C:\Windows\System32\\astsrv.exe. The backslash must be removed. The way to do this is to close the Services and open the Registry Editor (StartàRunàRegedit). Make sure to left-click on My Computer (So that you are starting at the top of the Registry) and press Ctrl-F. In the Find box, type \\astsrv.exe and click Find Next. Each time it finds this, double click on the registry entry and remove one of the backslashes, then click Ok. Press F3 to Find Next and repeat these steps until it is finished searching the Registry. Go back to the Services section and try to Start the AST Service.

Thanks very much. The reinstall option worked fine.

Well I can't say what happened to your PC, but our AST Service does have some dependency services (of Microsoft) that need to be running. I wasn't aware of RPC myself, but that's likely because this service should be running on most/all PC's. Which version of Windows are you currently using? You can find this by right-clicking on My Computer and clicking Properties.

I'd check to see that the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) service is Started on your PC:

If you click Start-->Run, type SERVICES.MSC and click Open/Ok, you can scroll down the right-hand side until you find the RPC service. NOTE: There will ne a RPC Locator and RPC service. Don't worry about RPC Locator, but make sure that the RPC service itself is Started. You may also want to make sure that the Windows Event Log service is Started.